Google Co-founder Larry Page Uses This Economic Principle To Guide Innovation: It's All About Building What Wouldn't Exist Without You

At TED2014, Google co-founder Larry Page was asked by interviewer Charlie Rose about how he approaches innovation and growth. Page's answer drew from economics to make a larger point about progress and impact.

What Happened: Page shared that he relies on "additionality," a key economic concept, which, in his words, "means that you’re doing something that wouldn’t happen unless you’re actually doing it."

He explained that rather than optimizing on what already exists, his strategy is to push the limits and "doing things people might not think are possible."

"The more you learn about technology, the more you learn what’s possible," he added.

Page believes meaningful impact emerges from curiosity and contrarian bets. "I just try to focus on that and say, ‘What is that future really going to be, and how do we create it?'" That means working on projects no one else is looking at.

"It's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on — because that's where the additionality really is."

Why It Matters: The HM Treasury defines additionality as "real increase in social value that would not have occurred in the absence of the intervention being appraised."

Page's use of this principle, which he spoke about in 2014, seems to have continued over the past decade. Earlier this year, reports emerged that Page is developing a new AI-powered startup, Dynatomics, whose goal is to streamline product development.

Page, who Elon Musk named as one of the two smartest people he has met, is currently the 7^th richest person on the planet, according to Forbes. His net worth stands at $139.8 billion.

Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998 as Ph.D. students at Stanford, and together they developed the PageRank algorithm that runs the search engine. He was Google's CEO until 2001, when Eric Schmidt stepped in. Page returned as CEO in 2011 and remained at the helm until 2015, when he became CEO of Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL, Google's newly formed parent company.

In 2019, he stepped down from that role but remains a board member and controlling shareholder.

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