During the Q&A session at the end of the event, I've asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who just came back from a bicycle ride) a question about some of the changes that occured over time in the company's innovation process and notably about the "chaotic" environment inside Google. Here's what he had to say:

"I think chaos is important in right proportions. We always tried to run our company with 10 or 20% chaos. As we grow, in absolute terms we become more chaotic, I guess. But then there's the other 80 or 90% that is also growing. A lot of the work that you see here, both the interface refinements which are apparent but also a lot of the back-end work which has to happen to make them possible and not to mention all the work that goes into the individual corpuses... All those are part of the non-chaotic side though at some point in the past it might have been thought of us as chaotic... For example, just going out there and digitising books on an incredible scale, which was crazy, and now the fact that it makes a tremendous difference to the quality of our search and the caliber of information that we could retrieve."