Google has excelled in both creating and sustaining a culture within the organization that thrives on innovation. They champion leveraging digitization to foster innovation in both connecting with individuals and leveraging global resources. Empowering their employees to work on new areas of their choice for 20% of their time unleashes enormous intellectual power to attempt innovative solutions to existing problems.

While location-based services such as GPS are very useful in developed countries, the developing world does not even have a documented map to build a GPS system. Engineers in Google India developed a “map maker platform” with a wiki like architecture to leverage the local knowledge of citizens of these countries to create the entire digital road map of their respective countries.

The system works as follows: A clean map sheet of a city is loaded on the web, and a wiki-like architecture is enabled for every citizen to draw and shape the map of their local areas (including street names and numbers, curves in the streets and major landmarks). The specific changes by each individual are governed by groups of lead users based on their expertise and contribution on specific local areas of the city. The user community built the entire digital map of Islamabad in Pakistan with details on street names and addresses in around 90 days. The traditional approach to creating a digital map of this city would have taken significantly longer time. In addition, the wiki map is always current.

This example illustrates how web 2.0 and related technologies can help firms leverage global resources to solve unique problems.

Google approached their market in a very different way, customising it towards the capabilities and possibilities in a developing country. A product previously only available for customers in developed countries now became available for customers in a developing country.

While products might be developed for customers in developing countries, the innovations can also have value for consumers in developed countries.

Source: Prahalad & Krishnan (2009)