Lars Rasmussen on innovation, motivation and how Google Maps almost never came to be...

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Where there’s a desire to actually achieve something new and a high degree of motivation and genuine desire to overcome obstacles, it’s evident that anything is possible once you put your mind to it.

It is interesting to think that one of the greatest innovations in recent times was nearly disregarded as "unachievable".

Having attended the 2009 Warren Centre Innovation Lecture delivered by Lars Rasmussen the team from Brightlabs came away with a more clear understanding of what it actually took to create the phenomenon that is Google Maps. What started during the Tech Wreck as an idea sprung from his brother Jens, and something that was ‘never possible in web’, very nearly became a much different product to what it is today. Losing out on their initial funding due to an ill-timed  update by Yahoo (their perspective at the time, which has no doubt changed now!) to their existing mapping functionality, the two brothers were eventually introduced to one of Google’s founders, Larry Page.

During this initial meeting with Larry it was pointed out that the majority of what Google does is web based. The brothers then managed to completely change their thinking from ‘this can’t be done in web’ to ‘this has to be done in web’, transforming what was meant to be a desktop application into an early prototype of the web-based Google Maps we use today.

Having listened to Lars, it's very clear that some of the best motivation for innovation and new ideas is pressure. In the case of the brothers, the pressure of running out of money was a significant motivation to completely change their thinking from ‘this isn’t possible’ to working out a viable solution. Overall, the presentation was an excellent way to gain insight into how Google Maps came to be, and the process the brothers were forced to take to make their idea work. Innovation is never without risk, and taking that risk initially is often the hardest part of the process. Where there’s a desire to actually achieve something new and a high degree of motivation and genuine desire to overcome obstacles, it’s evident that anything is possible once you put your mind to it.

Lars and his brother have now set themselves a new challenge in delivering Google's most recent offering - Google Wave. In the case of Google Wave, the funding pressure was replaced by the need to deliver something ground-breaking that no one had seen before - they’d announced at the start of the project that they were working on something new that would revolutionise the way email worked, but couldn’t tell anyone what it was. It will be interesting to see how Google Wave will be received. The last five years have led to a flurry of accelerated innovation across the entire web industry and what was novel and new yesterday is dated today.

Google Wave promises incredible innovation; let's see if it can deliver.