Whitehall could use some Google thinking

Today’s New York Times has a fun piece about Google X, the secret lab where Google is working on its special projects. The ideas are, suitability, far out. They are, apparently, looking at connecting household appliances to the internet and creating a robot that could go to the office so you don’t have to.

It would be tempting to laugh if not for what Google has already pulled off. Indeed, the NYT reports that Google’s driverless car might soon go into production.

But in political terms what struck me about the article is that this is the culture that Steve Hilton embraces. Remember that when Hilton was working from California, he had a desk at Google. To someone from this mindset, the ideas that the Lib Dems are so keen to mock are not so crazy. Indeed given Google’s relative success compared to governments in the last decade or so, Whitehall could do with an injection of the Google mindset.