Below is a lesson from Observer on Google’s Eight Innovation Principals, as well as our key learning.

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THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES THAT MADE GOOGLE THE MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANY ON EARTH

Steven Kotler

February 23, 2016

In these times of dramatic change where the entrepreneurial landscape is constantly shifting, the large and slow cannot compete with the small and nimble. But being small and nimble is not without its challenges. You’ll need to figure out how to change the nature of your linear mindset, allowing yourself to think on exponential scales. You’ll also need to understand the technologies and tools driving change. Most important, though, you’ll need to solve the puzzle of innovation. Specifically, the kind of innovation often comes from ceaselessly amplifying one another’s ideas and actions. If you’re dependent upon innovation only from within your company, you are dead. You must harness the crowd to remain competitive.

Perhaps the world’s most innovative company, Google, has eight innovation principles that govern their strategy. Without doubt, these rules are core to your success as an exponential entrepreneur. My suggestion is that you write them on your wall, use them as a filter for your next startup idea, but above all, don’t ignore them—they offer the most potent innovation turbo boosts available. Let’s take a quick look:

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Key learnings:

1. Focus on the user: “Unless you’re customer-centric,” explains Branson, “you might be able to create something wonderful, but you’re not going to survive. It’s about getting every little detail right.”
2. Open will win: In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it’s critical to open yourself up and allow the crowd to help you innovate, build on each other’s ideas.
3. Ideas come from everywhere: Crowdsourcing can provide you with incredible ideas, insights, products, and services.
4. Think big, start small: Starting small is that it mitigates the losses of early failures. Start small on Day One that affects a small group, but aim to positively impact a billion people in a decade.
5. Never fail to fail: Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail.
6. Launch early and iterate: Never fail to quickly, to rapidly iterate your ideas.
7. Be a platform, float all boats: Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations…AirBnb, Uber, Instagram. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. They are the platform.
8. Make it matter: Is your company built upon a massively transformative purpose? When the going gets hard, will you push on or give up? Passion is fundamental to forward progress.

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