The Innovation Showcase at EMC World 2008 has added an interesting dynamic to the innovation process at EMC. In many advanced development groups I have seen during my career, innovation, prototypes, and proof of concepts “finish when they get there”.
The new process (being managed by the office of the CTO here at EMC) has introduced “customer deadlines” into the process. It’s a cool twist. The term “customers” takes on the additional definition of “partners and analysts” as well. And it’s not software that’s being given to these customers. It’s ideas and demonstrations. And the deadline (for us) is May 19 2008. The place: Las Vegas.
This week I received an installation kit from our R&D team in China. It was the first time I was able to test drive the proof-of-concept software representing the idea we proposed last October. What do I think of the demo?
No comment.
There’s two reasons for me to clam up about the demo software. Here they are:
I Have Nothing To Say
I received the software kit, installed it on my laptop, started up a couple of VMs, and test drove the application. The documentation was perfect. Everything worked. We had asked for an option to “reset” the system state so we could do a complete demo for the audience, reset back to the baseline, and then do the demo for a different audience. We asked for this feature pretty late in the game.
It worked perfectly.
As a matter of fact I would have to say that the whole process between myself, the CTO’s office, and the proof-of-concept team in China worked perfectly. What I liked most was that there was plenty of over-communication. I was invited to weekly conference calls, sent PowerPoint presentations and architectural/design documents, and shown demo progress via LiveMeeting.
So “no comment” actually means “great job”. I couldn’t have been more pleased with how it’s gone. EMC had promised inventors that certain ideas from the 2007 Innovation Conference would be built as a proof-of-concept. It wasn’t lip service.
You Need to See It For Yourself
The second reason that I have no comment is that I’d like to encourage you to stop by the Innovation Showcase yourself if you’re at EMC World next week. Now that the coding deadline has been reached, we’re entering the customer evaluation phase.
Again, this is new territory for EMC: formalize the involvement of customers and partners in the innovation process. There’s another new strategy as well.
Involve the press analysts.
It will be interesting to see whether or not the press covers specific ideas when writing about the Innovation Showcase at EMC World. The press will have something to say. Partners will have something to say. Customers will have something to say.
And from what I’ve been told, “what they say” will determine the life (or death) of our ideas. Each proof-of-concept is constantly evaluated against business opportunity. If it’s determined that the idea no longer justifies continued resource allocation, it’s over. On to the next idea.
So make sure you stop by! The Innovation Showcase is a very collaborative collection of the top research and ideas from EMC world-wide. Give lots of feedback in person, blog when you get back.
We need the input to take it to the next step.
Steve
