Reference no: EM133950144

Assignment:

Case Synopsis: Inside Google's Secret Lab

After reading Inside Google's Secret Lab, please address the questions at the end of this case study.

Google[X] is a secret facility run by Google, located about a half-mile from the corporate headquarters. Work conducted at this lab consists of 100 projects pertaining to future technologies, such as a self-driving car and Internet-connected eyeglasses. Such projects, which are called 'moonshots' within the company, are described by engineers and scientists who on them as million-to-one bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. "Anything which is a huge problem for humanity we'll sign up for if we can find a way to fix it," says the director of this secretive research lab. Work at the lab is overseen by Sergey Brin, one of the company's two co-founders.

Google[X] occupies a pair of otherwise ordinary two-story red brick buildings about a half-mile from Google's main campus. Since its creation in 2010, the company has kept X largely hidden from view. Google X seeks to be an heir to the classic research labs, such as the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, and Bletchley Park, where code breakers cracked German ciphers and gave birth to modern cryptography. "Google believes in and enables us to do things that would not be possible in academia, "says the director of the autonomous car project. "The co-founders have this idea that incremental improvements are not good enough. The standard for success is whether we can get those into the world and do audacious things."

The expansion of Google[X] is enough to give some Google investors a touch of heartburn, according to an analyst at a New York City equity research firm. "When it comes to creating businesses that are arguably a strategic overreach and likely margin eroding, that is when you get concerned." But other investors take a different perspective, recalling that this is the same type of curiosity that led to winning bets on other businesses that seemed irrelevant at the time. One such bet was Android, which now runs on 75% of all smartphones that were shipped around the world during the first quarter of 2013.

Questions:

1. Google's operations management system is based on its ability to create innovative new products. In what ways does Google X help it to (a) improve responsiveness to customers; (b) improve the quality of its products; (c) improve efficiency?

2. Operations management is also about improving existing products. In what ways does Google X help the company to achieve these objectives, for example, improving quality or customer responsiveness?

3. In what ways might Google's huge investment in its research center hurt the company if the operations management process is not managed effectively?

A minimum of three paragraphs, please!