I recently attended an all-hands meeting for the Office of the CTO sponsored by Chief Technology Officer John Roese.
One of John’s call to actions was as follows:
“Submit ideas”.
John was referring to EMC’s annual Innovation Roadmap contest in which employees worldwide submit ideas against corporate challenges. The Roadmap initiative was started in 2007 as a way for EMC employees to create a global innovation ecosystem. The contest has experienced year-over-year growth. In 2014 our innovation team published an infographic that summarizes the Roadmap (I have embedded this infographic at the bottom of this post).
Over the years the Office of the CTO has published advice on how to submit better ideas. This advice ranges from:
- The relevance of word count when submitting ideas
- The importance of idea collaboration
- The impact of collaborating across geographies
- Providing push-button introductions to people with similar ideas
- Topic modeling of idea trends year-over-year
Indeed we provided an exhaustive look at some of the raw analytic charts that have arisen from the contest.
This approach (known as Innovation Analytics) was used for many years within the walls of the EMC innovation community.
In recent years we’ve been approached by several universities (most notably Babson and the National University of Ireland, Galway) to extend the analysis beyond the walls of EMC and into the Twitter community. The relationship with these schools resulted in a finding that diverse twitter networks can stimulate innovation, causing the CEO of Twitter to tweet the following this week:
How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas MIT Sloan Management Review http://t.co/82mm68uwJs
— dick costolo (@dickc) June 2, 2015
So for those of you submitting ideas inside EMC (deadline is June 30th!), this year’s tip is:
Fragment (and leverage) your Twitter network!
Steve
EMC Fellow
