Case study: the characteristics of creative entrepreneurship of Google

What are the characteristics of creative entrepreneurship? Propose one case, analyze how and why the company/group can be regarded as creative in establishing and maintaining its entrepreneurship with reference to the above characteristics?

Case study: How and why Google can be regarded as creative in establishing and maintaining its entrepreneurship.

Creative industries are the industries which transfer human creativity into economic goods (Florida, 2012). Howkins (2001) defined that creative industries consist of fifteen industries including Research and Development (R&D) industry and software industry. The creative industries’ global market comprised 509 billion dollars in 2015 (United Nations, 2018), whose portion of the Gross World Product (GWP) was 0.07% (Jidushenhan, 2017). The average growth rate of creative industries exceeded 7 percent between 2002 and 2015 (United Nations, 2018), which demonstrated the creative industries’ constant contribution to the global economy.

Recognizing the positive impacts of the creative economy, governments like the British Government encourage creative entrepreneurship. Creative entrepreneurship is the foundation of a business or self-employment in creative industries, of which the main drive of growth and profitability is sustainable creativity and innovation. This essay will focus on the investigation of the characteristics of creative entrepreneurship from the perspectives of creative labors and creative environment management by analyzing the case of Google. The essay will begin with the background information of Google, and then the features of the creative labors—always ready to learn, diversified in backgrounds, stake and creativity professionalism, cohesive in company values and the way to get along with, and a unique lifestyle integrating work and life. The creative environment management of an enjoyable and open-space design and corporate entrepreneur (CE) strategy of the encouragement of venturing follow.

Google is a multinational technology company specializing in internet-related products and services. It ranked the second most innovative company in 2018 (Qiao, 2018). It also succeeded in commercial business since its parent company Alphabet owned 880 billion dollars market value in 2018 ranking 4th the world (TechOrange, 2019). Google adopts typical creative entrepreneurship in terms of employee and organization management.

Creative labors are supposed to learn everlastingly. It is because creativity is a process of producing new and useful ideas while many innovations are combinations of already existing technologies and products (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). The more domains an individual learns, the more combination alternatives he or she can come up with (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). In addition, since the technologies develop rapidly and the conditions of creative work may differ, the current scope of knowledge may not be enough to cope with unfamiliar situations. Thus, it is necessary for creative labors to expand their scopes to adapt to the everchanging conditions. For instance, Google released a program called Googler to Googler (G2G) encouraging employees to offer courses to their colleagues, ranging from creative skills for innovation (CSI) to dance (Zhang, 2017). Some expertise Google employees teach their colleagues working experience with updated feedbacks, too (Zhang, 2017). Quantities of celebrities are invited to Google to share their opinions on various topics like leadership and education as well (Yang, 2017). To make information available to everyone is not only a slogan and mission of Google searching engine, but also it is a key to sustaining creativity of Googlers.

As analyses above, diversity facilitates creativity. Thus, the diversity among creative labors which is internal diversity reinforces the strength. The diversity of gender, age, religion, sexual orientation and ethnicity provides with possibilities of novel combinations of views. Take Google as an example, Google comprised White (53.1%), Asian (36.3%), Mix-raced and other races (4.2%), Hispanic American (3.6%), African American (2.5%) and Native American (0.3%) in 2018 (Shenghuoshujv, 2018). Female employees consisted of 30.9% in Google in 2018 (Shenghuoshujv, 2018). Therefore, Google employees can develop Google+ products more user-friendly to all people from their multiple perspectives (LeapdotAI, 2018). Apart from the aforementioned diversity, including multiple stakeholders in the evaluation meetings helps optimize ideas throughout the creative process, since they can give advice on the proposals from the stance of other stages (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). For example, a Google doodle designer replaced a letter “o” of Google by the symbol of copyright to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the establishment of Copyright Act (see figure 1) (IT168, 2010). However, since the marketing team pointed out that the replacement infringed the intellectual property of Copyright, the doodle design was denied (IT168, 2010). The marketing team’s suggestion prevented Google from the crime of pirating. Additionally, Googlers frequently take turns to experience other management positions to learn all the necessary stages of a creative process (Brant, 2011). Thus, Googlers can have a bigger picture of a product creation process and design it more well-rounded to facilitate each stage.

Besides the internal diversity of employees, the external diversity of the cooperation with talents and the ended-users’ feedbacks also plays a significant role in creative entrepreneurship. Most creative entrepreneurs prefer to hire Creative Class whose job is to create new ideas, technologies and creative contents (Florida, 2012). One of the reasons is that the Creative Class are experts in their domains, so they can save some time and efforts in learning in the creative process (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). However, sometimes the Creative Class have too much confidence in their professional knowledge. They take some assumptions for granted even though there are other possibilities. Hence, their creativity is constrained by their domain-relevant skills (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). In this case, the external diversity of non-Creative Class is significant for they can break the routines. For instance, Google holds the contest of Doodle 4 Google every year, collecting self-created Google doodles from students in the US to inspire Google doodle designers (Doodle4Google, 2019). Besides contestants, the ended-users’ feedbacks are also a source of creativity and innovations. Owing to the diversity of the ended-users, they can reflect some bugs and improvable aspects from a novel stance. For example, Google user experience research registers are invited to use Google products and give feedbacks via online questionnaires or in a Google office (Google, 2019). Hence, Googlers can identify the problems more accurately and then modify the Google+ products in accordance with the users’ demands more creatively.

Only when diversity and cohesion among the employees are balanced can a company keep operation. If the diversified employees discrete in the company culture or the way to get along with, they may be able to endure for a period but meanwhile their intrinsic motivation for work may decrease. Since the intrinsic motivation affects creativity (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015), the unmotivated employees’ creativity performance will deteriorate. In a team, if there are too many different voices on a decision, they may not be able to reach a consensus on an innovation. Therefore, creative entrepreneurs are inclined to employ those candidates sharing the same value in the mission and the company culture to avoid hiring a potential quitter. This is exactly what Google applies. Google only selects the candidates with Googleyness—curious, open to learning, creative, communicative and livable (Wu, 2015). Thus, Googlers in a team are both diversified in backgrounds and cohesive in Google culture, so they can be creative in work while maintaining good relations with each other and the company. They can also communicate with one another more smoothly and efficiently in a team debate with fewer communication obstacles.

Another cohesion between creative labors is their lifestyle. Most of the creative labors live a life with work penetrating, which means that their life is driven by their intrinsic motivation for creative work. They hold the value that their work not only generates impacts of culture, economy and society, but also the creative work meets their needs for self-actualization and self-transcendence. They are able to self-express their interests and values and self-improve during work. Therefore, they can gain a sense of accomplishment and happiness from their work, which further incentivizes them to continue their career path. For example, Google only hires those who have the passion of the job and create impacts (Stillman, 2018). Google’s employees’ desire to create unique and awesome projects all the time is one of the causes of their willingness to live a life of “twelve hours a day, six days a week” work (Brant, 2011).

Florida (2012) argued that in order to support the dedicating lifestyle of creative labors, a livable working environment is required. If the corporation is full of fun elements, comfortable and convenient like a home, it is likely that the employees are willing to stay longer in the office. Moreover, if the company offers necessary living facilities like bathrooms and canteens, employees can actually live in the workplace without going home. Hence, the time saved from the trivial living chores can be spent on work more concentratedly. For self-employed creative labors, some of them transform a certain space into a loft or a studio, so they can also work at home and save time from commuting. For instance, the headquarter in Google Singapore, the logo of Google is made of Lego building blocks while there are some available Lego toy bricks for the employees and visitors to freely play with (Curator, 2018). Also, Google employees can access to delicious food, coffee and sofas every floor (Curator, 2018). The welfare in Google makes employees feel at home regardless of the stress of deadlines and overworking.

However, to let employees enjoy the creature comforts is not the focus of the enjoyable working environment. One of the aims is to incentivize the employees to enjoy their work, making them self-motivated to invest more time and efforts into work (Brant, 2011). Florida (2012) described it as a “caring sweatshop”. Admittedly, to some extent, the welfare and the delightful working climate can offset the stress of overworking (Brant, 2011); but some employees like Adrian Caballo (2017), a previous Google software engineer, still criticized that his life was totally occupied by his work in Google and eventually left the firm. Furthermore, the internal research manifested that the welfare in Google was not a major reason for the employees to stay (Yang, 2017). Then stimulating the employees to work longer is not the main aim to create a pleasurable working environment.

The major goal of the pleasurable working environment is to create an interactive space for diversified employees. In the common area with food and entertainment, people from different backgrounds are more likely to meet and exchange ideas. At such leisure time and location, employees may generate interdisciplinary inspirations, since the mutual communication is also a learning process. For instance, the initial inspiration of Google Desktop Search derived from Marrisa Mayer (Google product manager) when she was chatting with a colleague in the corridor (MT, 2007). As the former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt (2014) said, there are no bulkheads separating office desks in Google, so the employees can feel free to reach other colleagues. Due to the open-space office design, some Google staff like a product designer Anne Halsall (2017) complained that there was little private room for them to think peacefully. Hence, Google introduces a 5-minute daily meditation practice for employees to increase their concentration to adjust to the lively atmosphere (Gao, 2016). Moreover, Google encourages employees to take turns to deliver speeches on a regular basis, informing other teams of their latest achievements of their work (Yang, 2017). Hence, Google’s employees can be inspired by each other.

Apart from the physical pleasurable and open-space design of the working environment, the working climate of encouraging ventures is the core of creative entrepreneurship. The approach to creating such a “soft control” (Florida, 2012) working climate is CE strategy, which includes management support, autonomy, time availability, reward and few organizational boundaries (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). Management support is senior managers’ champion of creative ideas and the provision of crucial resources, which facilitates the innovation mentally and physically. As for Google, the founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin back for the methodology of “fast prototyping, fast failure, fast learning”, so Googlers dare to fail several times and learn from experience (Chen, 2016). Googlers prototype models within one to two days after they put forward a new idea and test them with accurate users (Chen, 2016). In this way, Googlers can identify problems and weaknesses of the models in the prototyping process and the real testing, and subsequently they can develop the ideas (Chen, 2016). In addition, Googlers in Area 120 (an internal Google incubation base) can get funding from Google to develop own start-ups based on own innovations (Yang, 2016). For small-medium enterprises, they do not possess adequate funding and resources like Google to offset the risk of the failure of venturing, they may avoid innovations but imitate successful cases as ecological rationality strategy instead (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). Autonomy and time availability of employees with manager’s advocation also takes an important part in creativity. If the staff has little autonomy or time to try out their novel ideas, they can hardly proceed with the creative process and tend to be uncreative. To protect Google from this occasion, Google adopts a “70-20-10” time management—70% of the time for core work of search engine and advertisement, 20% of the time for interested projects and 10% of the time for fancying freely (MT, 2017). With abundant time, freedom and enthusiasm, Googlers automatically maximize their creativity in their interested projects and ideas and create a series of innovative products like Google Talk (MT, 2017). What’s more, rewards reinforce the motivation of creativity. More than delicious food and coffee, Google offers monetary incentives and even promotions to the employees who invent creative and good-selling products and services (TOPick news, 2017). Last but not least, the few organizational boundaries mean fewer hierarchy barriers of resources mobility. Some may be confused with Shalley, Hitt and Zhou’s (2015) argument that the higher the institutional complexity is, the more creative an organization can be. The institutional complexity here is multiple audiences’ expectations for the innovation, which embodies the diversity of collaborators rather than bureaucracy (Shalley, Hitt & Zhou, 2015). Hence, a flat organizational structure with various teammates is more flexible for a creative process. Google’s organizational structure is cross-functional with the philosophy of specializing manager positions by value chain activities (see Figure 3) (Alhajri, 2018). As Figure 3 illustrates, the basic units are teams divided by product markets or geography within each top-level activity rather than a hierarchy ladder (Alhajri, 2018). This multidivisional structure enables Googlers to form a product team horizontally based on the labor requirement, ridding of the worry of skipping ranks. Also, it reflects Google’s belief that every employee is equally important to the firm so the Googlers can be motivated by this spirit (Alhajri, 2018). Furthermore, Googlers are allowed to email their new ideas and proposals to an idea mailing list and then receive comments from them, no matter they are in the same team or not (MT, 2007). Therefore, Googlers can hear as many different voices as possible and improve the ideas and proposals more optimally.

In a nutshell, the characteristics of creative entrepreneurship are categorized into creative labors and creative working environment. The creative labors are diversified with backgrounds and stakes in terms of a creative process. Some creative entrepreneurs also include non-Creative Class labors and ended-users as supplementary creativity sources. The majority of creative labors adopt a lifestyle combining intrinsically-motivated work. To sustain such a lifestyle, an enjoyable and open-space designed working environment together with a soft-control CE strategy are critical. Google’s case demonstrates the characteristics above and sets an imitable example to the creative entrepreneurs.

References

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