The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

How would you

define Google?

If somebody asked you to define your own company, you would probably respond by describing what it is or what it does. For example, you might say, “We’re a bank,” or “We make office furniture,” or “We’re in the pharmaceutical business.” This is quite understandable. It’s the most simple and straightforward reply to the question. But that’s not the way radical innovators envisage their organizations, or the way they see the world around them.

For example, if you asked Larry Page to define Google, do you think his answer would be, “We’re a search engine”? Not very likely. He may have stated that one of his primary goals is still to create “the search engine of my dreams,” but judging from his company’s diverse and rapidly widening portfolio of products, services, and interests, Page would appear to view Google a little more broadly. For a start, the company has given itself an extremely elastic definition for the word search. What began as a friendly software system for quickly finding accurate information on the Internet has been transformed over the years into myriad value-added search services. Think Google Images, Books, Movies, News, Finance, Alerts, Product Search (formerly Boutiques.com), Groups, Hotel Finder, Language Tools, Patent Search, Life Search, Blog Search, Scholar, Shopping, Accessible Search (for the blind and visually impaired), Custom Search, Knowledge Graph, Trader, and Zagat (the restaurant, nightlife, and hotel guide). It’s easy ...