TheThreePercent

This is the seventh in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series

In 1998, I met a Stanford student who had written a paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The paper described an invention he called the PageRank algorithm. At the time, IBM had published findings on a similar technology, which it called ‘Clever’. Both inventions did, in a very general sense, the same thing: crawl the World Wide Web, index web pages, and generate better search results based on the number and sources of hyperlink references to each page.

It was suggested that this student come to work for IBM and get a job in research on the Clever team. But he and his colleague had other ideas. They decided to build a web site on their own, something they could afford to do at that early stage in their careers on the back of a little seed money. They intended to create a self-standing resource for organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible. As the last section of their paper indicated, they also intended to overcome the problem of clutter and conflict-of-interest caused by the dominant advertising driven model of the day’s search engine web sites. For this, they got seed money and collaboration from some of the smartest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

In the meantime, IBM remained unclear what to do with Clever. The problem involved a key organizational gap. The researchers working on Clever intended to get the technology used in IBM products and services. But the most obvious market play, to create a web search site, did violence to a much deeper IBM intention: avoid direct competition with companies that buy IBM technology – like search engine companies. For a time, spin-offs were discussed, and IBM remained open to licensing Clever. But ultimately there was no stomach for an IBM search engine company, and several researchers wound up working for, among others, those two Stanford students, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If you believe that Google has changed the world, it is undoubtedly not simply their inventions but their innovative intentions that should be credited. Their technology was only ‘table stakes’. Their intention to build a real business with a novel perspective on search – something you can not patent or protect – got them to a place that Big Blue could not approach even with much more ‘technology’ in their pocket at the time.

Disclaimer: Others may remember things differently or have a different interpretation of events. The account above is how I remember the experience and what I learned from it.

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