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The fruit of “wasted” time

October 4, 2005 Roger Saner Innovation No Comments

Over at TomorrowConnecting I’ve noted that Google is offering free wifi access to San Francisco (Telkom take note). The interesting thing here is this initiative is the result of Google’s “20 percent policy” which allows its engineers to spend some of their working day on other (risky) projects.

The FAQ describes it thus: “One of our engineers recognized that secure WiFi was virtually non-existent at most locations. As a result, he used his 20 per cent project time to begin an initiative to offer users more secure WiFi access. Google Secure Access is the result of this endeavour.”

I see this as a great case for “wasting” time during a job – working on things which may well not lead anywhere, yet have great potential. Add other people into the mix and it gets exciting. The ThinkSync community is a local example of this…

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