Google Inc. wants to create a mid-sized research and development office in Canada with as many as 200 staff.
“We're looking to grow aggressively. We think there's a real opportunity for a Southern Ontario R&D centre,” Shona Brown, the company's senior vice-president of business operations, said in an interview in Toronto.
The foundations of that office are already in place, following the acquisition last summer of Reqwireless Inc., a startup in Waterloo, Ont., that makes Internet browser and e-mail software for wireless devices.
Google's website now advertises for just two positions in Waterloo, but Ms. Brown said the company is actually hiring across the board, from directors to fresh engineering graduates.
“We would like to grow a fairly sizable R&D centre there,” ranging between 100 and 200 people, she said. The company is also adding sales and marketing staff in Toronto. Google doesn't disclose its local headcount, but in Canada it is still small. In Toronto, it doesn't have its own offices, but rents executive space downtown. Worldwide, the eight-year-old company has about 6,000 employees.
The Canadian R&D centre will be part of a growing web of research sites around the world, where Google engineers typically work in small groups of three, are moved around from project to project, and don't specialize in a particular area.
“It's a dynamic and flexible model,” said Ms. Brown, a Canadian Rhodes scholar who was recruited by Google three years ago from the Los Angeles office of consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
A former national junior tennis champion, she has become one of the top executives at the world's No. 1 Internet search company. In 1998, she co-authored a popular business book called Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos that described managing a business in a volatile market such as technology.
“I think of Google as the petri dish in which you scale a company against that model. We are definitely on the edge of chaos. It is deliberately how we like to run ourselves. We at our core are very innovative and want to make sure we continue to be. We don't want to overly structure and manage. This is true in everything we do,” she said.
For example, Google's annual strategy process collects ideas from every employee about the most important things to focus on. Ideas span everything from a pets at work program to peer to peer Internet products.
The ideas are discussed and many get developed into essays that work their way up for review by the top executives.
“We don't want to get in the way of all the smart people we hire,” Ms. Brown said.
One of the big issues Google is working on today is the best way to work relevant advertisements into user-created content on-line, such as blogs and community networks.
Just this week, Google signed an agreement to be the exclusive provider of search and keyword advertising on News Corp.'s Web projects, including MySpace.com, a community of more than 50 million people who exchange messages, photos and other content.
As part of the deal, Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., agreed to direct at least $900-million (U.S.) of ad revenue to News Corp. over three years.
“Advertisers are just now starting to understand what to do with user-generated content,” said Wendy Muller, Google's head of sales and operations in Canada. “You see them almost like a deer in the headlights going: ‘Wow look what we should be doing.' So they get this.”
