I recently read a post on the SmoothSpan Blog “It’s Tough to Be a Big Company…” discussing Google’s innovation, or lack thereof. The post refers to “big ideas” , “disruptive” innovations and suggests that Google seems to have lost its way in both respects. The post encapsulates fairly well the challenge that Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Coke and almost every other mega-brand currently face, or have faced at one stage of their development.

Innovation is a funny thing. Today’s popular business thinking is fixated on innovation, mostly from the perspective of the “product”. Popular marketing wisdom dictates that you’ve got to have a madly differentiated and innovative product that completely stands out to succeed. Innovation is certainly an important piece of the puzzle and you can’t argue that it is not extremely important. However most people believe that innovation is the end-product of research and development and results in the gizmo you hold in your hand, the software you use or that cool knife-sharpener you show off at Christmas dinner.

“Innovation” is a lot more than just about the tangible product. My view is that innovation is often simply combining things that already exist in a new way, and needn’t be so centered on the tangible product itself. For instance, take the guts of an MP3 from there, redesign the case, take the packaging from there, take elements of the marketing plan from there, develop a brand based on that, take a press campaign from there, add a bit from over there, use the distribution from there, and so on. No single element of the total product itself need necessarily be innovative at all. It is simply the combination of all the elements that is the innovation. If that combination is successful the pundits will bestow “big idea” or “disruptive innovation” upon you. Luck you. Don’t let it go to your head.

This is what Google managed to do with its core product: search. Google’s search was essentially not a lot different from it’s long-forgotten predecessors, like AltaVista and Excite. Granted, there’s a complicated little algorithm at the heart of how the search engine determines what’s relevant and not, but that’s not even rocket science. Google’s real innovation was to get the original elements right: a clean and simple design, immensely usable, uncluttered, straightforward, with good and useful search results.  When Google first appeared on the scene, I used AltaVista too and in my opinion its results were just as good as Google’s. What I and millions of others preferred was Google’s simple design. (Before you get too excited and shout “Eureka!”, I’ll point you to my son’s new website.)

As essentially simplistic beings, we tend to be associative. “Bill is my friend”, “Joe is a moron”, “Ford makes okay cars”, “IBM is a boring computer company”, “Coke is a delicious drink”, “Google is the best search engine” and so on. If we are really forced to think, we might manage to come up with a few more descriptors for each, but probably not many. We like to to keep things simple. So to the majority of us, Google is still “the best search engine”.

Public companies have to feed the hungry Wall Street analysts and their shareholders with growth. When those big brand companies are subjected to the growth imperative they are in a conundrum.  Google has the majority of the worldwide search market. They are the best known search brand. We tend to have difficulty seeing beyond that. Where do they look for growth? Google could try to completely dominate the search market, but that, aside from being an expensive endeavour, would probably lead to a consumer and industry backlash. So they, and other companies that see limited growth potential in the market for their core service or market, need to move on to other things. How are you supposed to do that? Well, often by “innovating”. And if you can’t innovate internally, you start buying innovations that you can improve upon or market more effectively.

So this brings us back to the judgement that Google is not innovative.

There is a lot of product innovation coming out of Google. That’s not the problem. It is the Google brand. One of the challenges of being a large company, as Google is, is that internal product innovations tend to get lost in the size, scope and perception of the brand. Are any of Google’s product innovations perceived to be as big as their original search innovation? No. Google is synonymous with search, so we as simplistic consumers and hype-peddlers tend to overlook anything new that doesn’t fit our definition of Google the brand.

Google is often accused of simply reinventing already existing products, in the hope of offering addtional products and services that will feed future growth.  For instance, Google has developed word processors, spreadheets and other software that are not particularly innovative in isolation – put them together into an online offering and there is some potential. The innovation? Our “offices” are accessible from a browser anywhere in the world. You don’t need to spend $400 on over-bloated Microsoft Office, you don’t need to spend 30 minutes installing it and personalizing it on every computer you want to work on. Disruptive, Big Idea? I don’t know, but go ask Microsoft if they’re feeling a little uncomfortable. I suspect that “Google Docs” won’t ever be seen as disruptive by the hype-peddlers, even though it may have more users than Skype for instance, because it’s simply harder to identify in the larger Google brand. Is it more “behaviour changing” than Skype, for instance? I’d argue, yes.

The real issue here is brand perception and the simplicity of our associative brains. Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Skype are all just easily-identifiable symbols of changing usage patterns and technologies: digital photos, text messaging, digital video, VoIP respectively. They, in and of themselves, are not responsible for the disruptive innovations or even “Big Ideas”, just the dominant symbolic brands in their application niche.

If I was Google, I’d learn from Microsoft’s (and many others’) mistakes and create strong and distinct new brands instead of watering down their core brand. A lot less Google Earth, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Mail/Gmail, and a lot more Bloggers and Picasas. Now think of “Google Docs” in isolation, say as “iDocs”, free of all the Google-isms. Are you feeling a bit better? Does it sound just a little cooler? Can you imagine telling your friends how great it is? Can you see an “iDocs” brand becoming the de facto standard for the virtual office? Oversimplifying? Oh, yes. But you get where I’m going with this.

Google is clearly the dominant symbolic search brand. Through acquisition, they also own the biggest online video brand (YouTube). Google is completely wasting the potential of so much of their internal innovation because they are continue to be indecisive and brand wishy-washy.