The Google Way

Look for Ideas Where They Are

You've seen how Google motivates its engineers to seek new ideas and share them. But its leaders haven't stopped there. They've also built a company able to look for ideas wherever they may be—whether at a university, among the users of the programs it freely provides to developers, or in other companies.

Consider Amin Saberi, who was in his last year at the Georgia Institute of Technology when he was involved in developing the keyword auction algorithm discussed in Chapter 4. The problem posed during an interview reminded him, a fellow student, and his thesis advisor (a Berkeley alumnus) of a more general pairing problem that had been solved 15 years earlier. They applied their knowledge to the algorithm, and a few ...