Universum’s annual appraisal of the UK’s top employers (or most desirable) once again saw Google sitting at the top. As discussed in the previous blog on ‘Everyone wants to work for Google’, it seems that what people admire most about Google is what they don’t necessarily see in other big companies. The desire and ability to innovate.

This is a company where innovation is built into the DNA of its business and drives it constantly (read about their 8 pillars of innovation – http://www.google.com/think/articles/8-pillars-of-innovation.html). Two of the most striking pillars are ‘strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection’ and ‘never fail to fail’, two things which will often strike fear into big corporates, where new programmes have to be fail-safe and scoped out to absolute perfection.

The truth is innovation never is and never can be – and companies like Google know that. Innovation means taking some risks – and doing some stuff that you can’t 100% predict. It also means not following what the competition have done, and never assuming that ‘it has to be done this way’. For organisations who hire graduates – the very generation who have grown up with Google, Apple and Facebook virtually from birth – innovation is what they have come to expect.

So, employers need to embrace it, not simply in how they attract people, but also:

In whom they really want to hire – for example, we have masses of talent with great digital skills, but few have studied computer science.  If you want technologists, are you simply looking in the wrong place?

In how you develop talent – lots of grads want to change the world, partly because they are told they can. Then they start work in a big corporate…and they’re told they can’t. Why does it have to be that way? How can companies unlock the ideas and innovations of people who are just dying to make a meaningful contribution?

We see it in programmes like One Young World. But where else? On a national, local, company level? Sometimes, but not enough. If we are a knowledge economy, then let’s make more of it.