was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1998, with a goal to develop and promote a fast and effective search engine that would provide quality search results. Over the years, innovations have enabled progression of the company's mission from its original version - "organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web" to a much more ambitious one - "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", with handful products, applications and services across multiple industries such as the internet information provider industry, software industry and mobile phone industry. The company's annual report of 2013 showed that by end of 2012, there were 53,861 full-time employees, and R&D department contributed to the most headcounts, which was more than one third of the total number. Probably the most significant innovation success for Google is its core product, the Google search engine, which provides the user with a comprehensive coverage of information from the Internet, highly relevant search result, and fast speed. It has been so recognized that people even use it like a verb – "Well, let's Google it." .
Google's innovation process is highly differentiated from that of its contemporaries. In terms of ideation, Google is famous for the "20% time" program to gather ideas and identify business opportunities in the first phase of innovation process, in which all employees are allocated with 20% of their work time out of one day of a week to work on projects of their own choice5. Furthermore, ideas are taken not only from inside, but also from outside of the organization such as student innovation challenge programs. It can be concluded from here that Google's leadership is highly risk tolerant in terms of ideation of new product development.
For majority of the innovations, the development and the launch phase are usually inseparable, as Google would usually launch the beta product in quite early stage to users for testing and gathering feedback.
