Innovation Works grants flexibility to engineers

Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China, quit Google and launched a venture business platform called Innovation Works a year ago. Now his team expanded to about 200 people and moved to a new building. At the one-year anniversary celebration, Lee talked about the latest development of Innovation Works and the future plans.

Innovation Works has invested $4 million in a dozen projects covering areas of mobile Internet, Internet consumption, e-commerce and cloud computing, Lee said at his company`s one-year anniversary celebration in Beijingthis September. At the new site, where his 200-person team planned to move, Lee unveiled five projects.

On the wall next to the reception desk hang five logos of the five released projects under the logo of Innovation Works, which implies the operation mode here – the company provides early-stage funding and a team working as the matrix provides other needed assistance such as human resources, accounting, law, public relations and business consultancy.

Tapas, a smart phone operating system based on the Android operating system, was built for the Chinese market. It will be pre-installed on smart phones manufactured by Haier, Sharp, and Tianyu.

Wang Junyu, product manager of a software assistant for Android phone Wonderpod, demonstrated the application for the guests. Wonderpod, launched two months ago, already has a number of users.

The projects also included Umeng, an analytics tool for mobile developers in China, Photo Wonder, a photo processing tool for mobile phones and an SNS and Web-based games publishing tool targeting the global market called Ascending Cloud.

Lee said engineers will get stakes in their own start-ups. In China, engineers don`t always get ownership in the projects they develop, he added.

Lee said this is part of the company`s culture - granting enough flexibility and freedom to engineers in order to build a sense of ownership – just like the slogan on their recruitment poster, "Join your company."

The venture also established the Innovation Works Development Fund (IWDF) to provide larger funding to projects that have grown more mature and independent. After this stage, other venture capitals (VCs) will participate in and take the lead, Lee said.