The 70 Percent Solution
Posted on December 10, 2005 Comments (4)
The 70 Percent Solution byJohn Battelle, an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative.
Google is also well know for the 20% rule for techincal staff (“Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about. This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut – products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch.”). Both models attempt to assure significant time is devoted to new ideas.
Related posts:
4 Responses to “The 70 Percent Solution”
Leave a Reply
RSS Feed
August 27th, 2006 @ 6:25 pm
[...] Related: post on science and engineering careers – Google: engineers given 20% time to pursue their ideas by curiouscat Tags: Engineering, Science, Research, Students, Career, Technology Permalink to: Research Career in Industry or Academia [...]
September 19th, 2006 @ 10:02 pm
[...] Note to anyone with scientific content of high value that decides to allow internet access. Please contact Google and have them help you make it availble online. They don’t have any official program to do so, but for collections of enough merit I can’t imagine you would have any trouble getting some Google engineer to take on the project. the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin (pictured), Halley, Hawking, Heisenberg, Herschel, Hodgkin, Hooke, Huxley, Joule, Kelvin, Krebs, Liebnitz, Linnaeus, Lister, Mantell, Marconi, Maxwell, Newton, Pauling, Pavlov, Pepys, Priestley, Raman, Rutherford, Schrodinger, Turing, van Leeuwenhoek, Volta, Watt, Wren, and many, many more influential science thinkers up to the present day. [...]
October 7th, 2006 @ 1:13 pm
[...] When Google had few other products I think it was likely wise to push a bunch of stuff out the door quickly. Now that they have a bunch of decent, but not really great products, adjusting and taking the opportunity to improve those product makes sense. In my opinion they have always been very focused on search and AdWords (The 70 Percent Solution) though even that could be improved some as Google has acknowledged. [...]
April 30th, 2008 @ 11:08 am
[...] working on it. Guess what? That’s not a major expense. There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, [...]