Scott McNealy will be the keynote speaker at EMC’s 5th Annual Innovation Conference and Showcase in Santa Clara next month.
During the months of September and October I visited a variety of CompSci and EECS programs in California (e.g. UC Berkeley) and Washington (e.g. WSU). I spent most of my time chatting about engagement models and understanding the different research specialities on each campus.
Before my last visit, I heard that Scott had accepted our invitation to give the keynote speech at our annual Innovation Conference, so I arranged to meet with him for a brainstorming session. I found out that since his brief stint at Oracle he has been doing a lot of pro-bono consulting for start-ups of various sizes (e.g. Scott has had strong ties with Greenplum for many years). Scott’s relationships with Joe, Pat, and Jeff Nick made him very interested in coming to our event.
The timing also coincides quite well with Scott’s latest venture: WayIn. This new startup has already started to receive some press:
Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy has a new venture, but surprisingly, it’s not about building big hardware or enterprise software. It’s a new social startup called WayIn that’s focused on building a community of users that can vote and comment on pretty much anything.
EMC’s Annual Innovation Conference and Showcase is a one-day celebration where EMC’s world-wide technical community gathers to recognize the top innovators and ideas within the company. Nearly 1600 ideas were submitted into this year’s Showcase; three of them will be accounced as “Best in Show”. A variety of corporate sponsors will also award innovation grants to twenty different innovators from different nations across the globe. These twenty grants result in incubation funding and resources during 2012.
West Coast EMCers attending in person will have the chance to find out how Scott came up with the idea for WayIn, hear his thoughts on corporate innovation, and listen to his surprising take on the intersection of EMC and West Coast culture!!!
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
Director, EMC Innovation Network
