San Francisco — Google plans to introduce a new policy segment called “Google Ideas,” which appears to be a Googley take on the think tank. To head this division, the search engine titan has tapped a former State Department official “Jared Cohen” who is credited with assisting to bring social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to US diplomacy now heading to Google to form a new Think/do Tank called “Google Ideas”. Today that became official.
Jared Cohen, who until recently was serving the U.S. Department of State for the past four years on the Policy Planning staff, during which period he was a leading champion of using the Web to participate in what has been labeled as “21st Century statecraft,” will now lead the new division of Google starting in mid-October, he said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine tweeted by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Cohen, in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine published on Tuesday, said that Google Ideas is “basically a think/do tank.”
“Much of the examples for it is built off of my experiences on the Policy Planning staff,” he said, which he described as “the secretary of state’s personal start-up.”
Jared Cohen (left), formerly a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, is joining Google to lead a new think tank called Google Ideas. (Credit: Center for American Progress on Flickr)
“In the same way Policy Planning works by bringing together a lot of stakeholders in government, out of government, and across different sectors, so, too, will Google Ideas do something very similar,” Cohen said.
Cohen has been known as a digital guru for the State Department, helping focus attention within the government on emerging social-media technologies like YouTube and Twitter. “It is not designed to be, ‘Let us pool all of Google’s resources and tackle global challenges,’” the former State Department official told Foreign Policy.
Google Ideas will scrutinize a wide range of issues, according to Cohen: “… the range of challenges that it may concentrate on include everything from the sort of hard challenges like counterterrorism, counterradicalization, and nonproliferation, to some of the ones people might expect it to focus on, like development and citizen empowerment.” Cohen is calling this a “think/do tank” in the sense that Google Ideas will attempt to put some of the concepts it generates into action by working with government and third-party organizations.
“What I am interested in is the SWAT-team example of building teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges,” Cohen said.
Google already has a Google.org that promotes philanthropic causes through its charitable arm and various other initiatives such as “Project 10 to the 100th,” a commitment to provide 10 million dollars in funding to five ideas submitted by the public, which includes Google PowerMeter and Google Flu Trends. And Schmidt is a member of the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which provides advice on technology issues to President Obama.
Google and the State Department functioned earlier this year over Google’s dispute with China over censored search results, leading to a policy speech on Internet freedom by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that invoked Google on several occasions.
While at the State Department, Cohen, who has more than 300,000 followers on microblogging service Twitter, also led delegations of technology executives to Iraq and other countries. With Google’s size and scope growing exponentially, Cohen’s job will be a big one. I look forward to following his work.