In a previous post I mentioned that EMC has a large number of communities that generate data about the state of innovation at EMC. Perhaps the most active community is the Innovation Roadmap community. Thousands of EMC employees submit ideas into the Roadmap, with a corporate goal of selecting, funding, and incubating promising ideas. The diagram above highlights the different stages of this process.
The Innovation Conference is EMC’s annual celebration of Innovation; a single day when thousands of EMC employees gather simultaneously at locations around the globe. Last year I had the pleasure to serve as the MC of Innovation Conference #7 in China.
As EMC celebrates its eighth consecutive year of a dedicated innovation conference, there are some things that have stayed the same, and some that have changed.
First of all, if you follow the Roadmap diagram above, it illustrates that the process leading up to the Innovation Conference is similar to previous years:
- 26 Business Units within EMC created challenges announced to the global employee pool
- Employees from 32 different countries submitted ideas against these challenges
- A total of 5200 ideas were collected and judged
- 81 finalists were selected and asked to prepare elevator pitches for their ideas
- 27 of these are awarded as winners
- 3 of these are eligible as “best in show”
So we arrive at Innovation Conference #8 in much the same way as we have in years past; the winners and the best in show will be announced today, November 20.
So what’s different?
This year, the world can watch as the “Big 3” best in show candidates pitch their ideas in front of some of EMC’s top Executives as part of EMCTV’s “Ignition Sequence” video stream.
In addition, after hearing the pitches from the Big 3, the world can actually vote live for the “People’s Choice” winner.
By the end of the show the Ignition Sequence program will have announced all of the winners for 2014. The winning ideas will then continue down the Roadmap path listed above (business cases, PoCs, prototypes, etc).
If you are interested in watching the drama unfold, all of the information you need to tune into the event can be found on EMC’s Community Network.
Good luck to the finalists this year!
Steve
EMC Fellow
