Google X – the Moonshot Factory

Google is known as one of the most innovative companies in the world has changed our lives in so many ways but Google has grown up it's a big company now, does that make innovation more difficult?

So innovation is obviously core to everything we do it's the magnet for the extraordinary talent we have here and we don't take that for granted and we what we also want to ensure we do is put in place the opportunity for people when they have ideas to really explore those ideas even if their ideas outside of what their day job may be defined as and that's been true for Google since its earliest days. Many people have heard about something called 20% time. If you're an engineer and you have a new idea and interesting idea you could get permission effectively to explore that 20% that, that idea into your 20% time and out of that came some extraordinary things like Gmail but the thesis is if you have an idea that you're passionate about and we don't give you what the opportunity here to to explore it you'll explore it elsewhere and so we want to make sure that we continue to encourage innovation and really exploration.

That was the first iteration the second was then to put more structure and and and process around it we created something that was called Google X. That is now one of our other bet companies called X and out of that, came our self-driving car business WAYMO came our out of that came our first life sciences business verily. You can't be static and this company hasn't, it's evolved really the structures and process and leadership opportunities to continue to support innovation.

And really empower employees to feel that they could even challenge the status quo if they needed to and go off and do some of these other things.

Exactly.