San Francisco: In its bid to stop Google employees from leaving the company and begin their own ventures, Indian-born top executive Sundar Pichai has announced the company plans to set up a startup incubator within Google.
According to Forbes, the incubator, dubbed ‘Area 120’, is a new approach - part incubator and part new take on the spirit of the 20 percent time programme.
“Google has allowed its engineers and other employees to spend a day a week (or 20 percent time) on side projects,” the report added.
Techonology blog The Information reported recently that the incubator will be supervised by Google executives Don Harrison and Bradley Horowitz.
“We’ve always had a strong interest from within Google for people to go work on new things and have developed many of our products internally that way,” Pichai told Forbes.
Google may invest in some of the projects that are born out of Area 120 into independent companies.
