Harvard Business Review has a good article on Google’s ecosystem of innovation. For a quick overview, here is the idea in brief.
Also, here are two very dense and interesting sentences from the article:
“Every piece of the business plays a part, every part is indispensable, every failure breeds success, and every success demands improvement.”
“If the company’s expressed mission is to organize the world’s information, it has a somewhat less exalted but equally important unexpressed commercial mission: to monetize consumers’ intentions.”