Despite its tremendous growth and significant size today, Google maintains the open and freewheeling stance of a much smaller company. “We're really an internal ecosystem of entrepreneurs . . . sort of like the [Silicon] Valley ecosystem but inside one company,” one program manager told us. It is well known that Google employees are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time promoting their ideas to colleagues, assembling teams, exploring concepts, and building prototypes. How ideas turn into new businesses is less understood. If a project team believes that it has a winner, it appeals to the Google Product Council for formal project funding. The Product Council, which includes the company founders, top executives, and engineering team leaders, provides broad strategic direction and initial resources. Successful project teams can receive assistance from the Google Product Strategy Forum to formulate a business model and set milestones. Only after a team successfully proves the technical aspects of an idea and demonstrates consumer interest does Google focus on how the firm's core elements might be leveraged to enable the emerging business model. At this point, the Google Product Strategy Forum may begin to play a more active oversight and support role, including obtaining more significant resources, directing formal and regular engineering reviews, acquiring outside capabilities, or making some other part of Google work with the project team. At any given time, Google is typically supporting more than 100 new business concepts in various stages of development, and information about the projects is maintained in a central, searchable database. Managers estimate that approximately 70 percent of the projects support the company's core business in some fashion, 20 percent represent emerging business ideas, and 10 percent are pursuing speculative experiments. In the early stages, an experimental Web page will typically be launched at a special labs.google.com Web site. Later, the team may set up its own page, for example, maps.google.com. For business concepts related to existing Google offerings, the VP under whose purview the concept falls will keep track of all research activity worldwide and seek to provide some strategic coherence to the overall corporate effort. If successful, a project or set of projects may be brought together to become, in effect, its own division. A special committee determines the very few businesses that may have a link on Google's primary consumer Web page, www.google.com. If a project succeeds, team members can receive substantial bonuses (called Founder's Awards), sometimes amounting to millions of dollars. These bonuses do not match what entrepreneurs might make if they were successful on their own, but most employees see the benefits of remaining within Google—in particular, a much higher probability of success. Many Google managers have experience on the “outside” and thus relish the intense yet supportive and trusting atmosphere that Google offers. From the point of view of corporate entrepreneurship, the critical element is that project teams, while allowed to form spontaneously, receive systematic top-level attention and structured corporate support as they move forward. This is distinct from an Opportunist Model company such as 3M (NYSE:

), for example, has found that dedicated funds for innovation combined with clear, disciplined processes for allocating those funds can go a long way toward unlocking latent entrepreneurial potential. Well-designed Enabler practices also have the side benefit of exposing senior management to ambitious, innovative employees, allowing the company to identify and nurture future growth leaders. In our next posting, we'll look at another way that Enabler process can improve the innovation performance of a company.