One way to embrace the future is to allow your employees the freedom to pursue big, hairy audacious—and sometimes crazy—ideas. 3M has been doing this for years and, more recently, Google has taken up the mantle. More specifically, the two companies allows many of its engineers and employees to spend anywhere between 20-50% of their time during on ideas outside their official areas of responsibility.
Recently I stumbled upon this article describing a Google patent for creating a massive floating data center that could use wave power to power the center and ocean water to help keep the many computers cool. It is an idea that is obviously years away from reality, but I still applaud the people who came up with the idea—and Google for giving them the freedom to pursue the idea.
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