Posts Tagged ‘google’

Back in September last year, Google unveiled a competition - Project 10^100 - calling for people to submit ideas that could help as many people as possible and committed $10 million to bring the best ideas to life. At first glance, this might appear to be a hommage to the Haley Joel Osment classic ‘Pay it forward‘ but in fact Project 10^100 was created to mark the 10th birthday of Google and ‘celebrate the spirit of our users and the web’. The deadline has passed, but now entrants - including a team from Ruder Finn - are anxiously waiting to see if they have made the final 100. The top 100 ideas will be published on Google’s website on 27th January, where the public will be given the opportunity to select the best ideas. CNN will be profiling some of the ideas and people behind them on their Impact Your World website. It will be interesting to see whether any of the winning ideas can live up to the promise of the competition rhetoric and whether Google’s financial backing can make them work. I’m optimistic that they can on both counts.

I’m a little less optimistic that the Ruder Finn entry will make it through to the final. We submitted an idea to create a new currency for goodwill but it may have been a little too ambitious. The real winner however will be Google. Over the past 3 months, employees have been reviewing thousands of submissions (they received over 100,000). Ostensibly this process was put in place to select the finalists but the staff reviewing the entries will no doubt have been inspired and invigorated by the ideas that were submitted. In effect, Google has just hired 100,000 management consultants to think of ideas that could improve their business and corporate culture. And they paid just $10 million for it. Pure genius.