Alberto Savoia

Large organizations have enormous innovation potential at their disposal. The number of innovative products and services that reach the market and succeed, however, is a very small fraction of that potential. The quantity and type of innovation a company achieves is directly related to the way it approaches, fosters, selects, and funds innovation efforts. Large companies tend to build upon and around their past and current successes which leads them to a very narrow innovation spectrum and inhibits most breakthrough innovation.

In this presentation, based on his Stanford workshop by the same title, Alberto Savoia leverages his own experiences as both a successful serial startup entrepreneur and as an “innovation agitator” at Google to show you how already established and successful companies can innovate like startups, but also leverage their existing resources and market reach to significantly increase their odds of market success with innovative products.

Google does many things differently, and the way it approaches innovation is one of the most distinctive aspects of its culture, and something most large companies could learn from.

In this presentation, Google’s early employee and Innovation Agitator Alberto Savoia describes how the company’s core belief that “great innovation can come from anyone at any time” has shaped its culture and its practices, and has led to some of its most notable successes. From Google’s famous “20% time” rule that gives employees one day a week to pursue their own projects, to its flat organizational structure and the unique role of managers, to its data-driven process for testing new ideas to ensure fast failure, Alberto will explain how Google has managed to keep true to its startup roots and core beliefs as it grew into one of the largest companies in the world. Finally, Alberto explains how any company can successfully adapt Google’s innovation practices to their existing culture.