If a candidate can be eliminated from consideration because an interviewer marked him/her as a "B", I don't think that's more strongly correlated with innovation than SAT scores and GPAs. It doesn't mean the interviewer is being a good judge of technical chops. And on top of that, the article doesn't say technical skill or ability correlates with innovation, but individual drive. So really, nothing adds up here.

I'd say getting a high SAT score and GPA requires pretty much the same skill set as technical code-on-the-whiteboard interviews. Actually, technical interviews are even more narrow, and probably weed out very many highly creative, motivated people that "have a mission".

The top students often dont't have an overly high GPA because they take a difficult courslanded for them and go beyond there classes and end up prioritizing more than just a 4.0. Also I find highly technical interviews have limited value beyond a simple pass\fail because the poorly represent an actual working environment.

If you really want the best have them walk you through a project they are proud of. It takes a lot more effort and you need to let go of the ego boost of knowing all the answers as you go over the same problems with everyone. However, you can dig a lot further into how they think.

PS: It's important to reolise Google is way to large to be all that picky though. Lucky the vast majority of Google projects are not really that difficult or important. But, if you need the 'best' there are people out there that will blow your mind.