With reference to an organization of your choice, discuss the ways in which ethics can influence

innovation in an organization.

Stakeholder
Individual Group
Customers Government
Directors and managers Pressure group

Ethics have always influenced innovation in large organizations, especially multinational

companies. In this essay, I will examine how ethics can influence innovation in a popular
American multinational company, Google.

Ethics also called moral philosophy, which are concerned with what is morally good or bad and
morally right or wrong. While innovation means to renew, to change, to improve or to replace
something positively. In the context of companies, innovation is a process by which a product or
a service is renewed and brought up to date by applying new processes, introducing new
techniques, or establishing successful ideas to create new value. So briefly, examining the ways
in which ethics can influence innovation in an organization is examining how moral principles
can influence the ways that the company can do to renew its product or service.

As Google is an American corporation dealing in products and services that are based on
internet. This multinational company specializes in research, software, online marketing and
cloud computing which can raise ethical issues related to online marketing and the use of IA. Its
main product, the search engine gathers incredible amounts of data on people who use it and
stores records of those researchers as a tool to improve the corporate’s efficiency. Then,
governments could use Google's information to investigate individuals visiting particular website
and to avoid possible criminal actions. However, this raised an ethical issue about privacy.

In 2007, Google’s controversy regarding Street View raised privacy and security concerns.
Street View allows for high-resolution photos enabling the users to explore 360-degree
panoramic, street-level imagery of places once the user types in the correct address. This could
range from vehicle license plates, properties, people doing mundane activities, as well as people
in compromising or out-of-context situations. Nevertheless, Google’s defense claimed that there
is nothing wrong with collecting data from unsecured wireless networks because those networks
by nature broadcast their activity for the world to see. Apparently, these are what we all are
agreeing on when we are being asked to agree to terms upon joining a wireless network. They
claimed that the data gathering was for better marketing and that it had no unlawful intent
whatsoever.

This crisis management of Google was ineffective as it raises more concerns, numerous protests
around the world and countless lawsuits, forcing the giant tech company ending its illegal
collection of WiFi data transmissions.

When Google is formed, they pledged to not be evil in an attempt to showcase how much
different they would be than Microsoft. Now, two decades later, the governments across the
world are looking at Google like they are evil, and Microsoft isn’t on the list of companies being
targeted which include Facebook and Apple. “Don’t be evil” is a phrase used in Google’s
corporate code of conduct, which is formerly preceded as a motto. But there are many criticisms
around this motto. On 16 May 2013, Google was accused of being "calculated and unethical"
over it uses of highly artificial distinctions to avoid paying billions of pounds in corporation
tax owed by its UK operations. The company was accused by the committee, which represents
the interests of all UK taxpayers, of being "evil" for not paying its "fair amount of tax". In 2015,
the UK Government introduced a new law intended to penalise Google and other
large multinational corporations' artificial tax avoidance. Moreover, In 2018, under a plenty of
satires, the motto “Don’t be evil” was removed from the preface of Google’s code of conduct,
only leaving a mention in the final line: "And remember… don't be evil, and if you see
something that you think isn't right – speak up!". This is really important because the code of
conduct is how Google’s values are put into practices. It’s built around the recognition that
everything they do in connection with their work will be, and should be, measured against the
highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.

As a result of promoting the application of AI in almost every production and management

activities, many Google employees were fired because AI proves that it’s much more effective
than human labor, especially Google’s AI Ethics Research Department. A female co=lead from
this department in Gebru was fired because she co-authored a groundbreaking paper that showed
facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color (Google Photos
has had bias issues since at least 2015, when it identified a Black woman as a gorilla). Nearly
7,000 members of the AI community, including about 2,000 Google employees, signed a letter
protesting the company’s treatment of its AI Ethics leadership. As a result, it will be harder to
recruit and retain people in the AI function and within Google as a whole. Recently Google also
placed an engineer on paid leave after dismissing his claim that its artificial intelligence is
sentient. The company’s human resources department explained that is because he had violated
Google’s confidentiality policy. So we can say that Google did not respond well with crisis
evolved around its AI ethics problem, its contingency planning hasn’y been prepared well for
managing crsises around Google’s use of AI and AI couldn’t totally fix Google’s ethics problem
about employees’ treatment.

In conclusion, Google has always tried to solve its existing ethics problem by changing the
models of conduct, applying advanced technologies, and fixing its terms of policy and privacy.
These changes are substantial and have affected the ways that the company operate. However,
ethical problems are still there and they entail more innovations from the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Tax_evasion
https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-strategy-google/
https://www.itbusinessedge.com/business-intelligence/how-ai-could-fix-googles-ethics-
problem/
https://hrexecutive.com/sumser-googles-ai-ethics-problem-just-got-even-worse/
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/ethical-issues-among-stakeholders-google-30716.html