Over the last two years I’ve witnessed an organizational and cultural change regarding the development of new product concepts at EMC. My previous company (Data General) was acquired by EMC in 1999, and within 6 months I had transfered to a research group in Hopkinton. My group had various names over the next few years, such as “Advanced Development”, or “Emerging Technologies Group”.
These groups were all over the place at EMC. Every group, silo, or stovepipe in those days set aside a group of “thinkers and tinkerers”, who had such tasks as “monitor the industry”, “play with new technologies”, “investigate new companies”, or “build a proof-of-concept”. Certainly all of these groups tried to turn their ideas into working product. (In 2001 I helped launch a product called Storage Scope in this culture). Those “innovative pockets” throughout EMC had a pretty strong chokehold on new ideas.
It doesn’t work that way anymore. From what I can tell, EMC is shifting toward a new paradigm:
A Level Playing Field.
itThe storage industry, and the computer industry in general, has a history of “dedicated research facilities”. One of the problems that can occur is that the “researchers” are often times not the same people who know how to drive a product to market. Some can be more effective than others when it comes to coming up with ideas that result in products bought by customers.
For example, in the storage industry, HP Labs at Palo Alto has a storage research department that has long sought to influence their development organization. “HP AutoRAID“, I believe, was a project initially launched out of HP Labs that made it to customers. IBM of course has a rich tradition of research facilities and made a big announcement this week about some of their latest storage research.
But the recent shift at EMC is to rely not on the few, but on the many.
Raise Your Hand
This culture shift started in the summer of 2007 when two EMC execs (Mark Lewis and Jeff Nick) put out a call for ideas. Any EMC employee anywhere in the world could participate. Approximately 400 ideas were submitted, and all were given equal weight. The judges were “blind” to hierarchy. Thirty were chosen to come to our Ed Services facility in Franklin, MA and present their ideas to a panel of executive judges. Again, these judges, for the most part, didn’t know the participants (or their ideas). I’ve written about how these ideas were judged, how prizes were awarded, how proof of concepts were built, and how customers were given demonstrations and gave feedback.
This year the number of submissions has risen from roughly 400 to nearly 1000 ideas.
Why change from innovative pockets to a level playing field? Well, it stands to reason that the majority of EMC employees that are “in the trenches delivering solutions” know what our customers want. So EMC execs have decided to ask all 39,000 EMC employees to innovate on behalf of their customers. Are most people participating? Not yet.
Pushing Innovation Down
The company-wide innovation culture is being adopted by individual business units within EMC. My organization, for example, contains the CLARiiON, Centera, Celerra, and Rainfinity products. Our GM, Rich Napolitano, put out the call for innovative ideas last April. A handful of people raised their hands. I was one of them. Rich paraded all of us in front of his staff to evaluate our ideas.
My idea was to hold a XAM coding challenge in our business unit. In June Rich sent out an email to his entire organization encouraging employees to sign up. Sixteen people raised their hand.
Four people in April. Sixteen people in June.
400 ideas in 2007. 1000 in 2008.
No More Top Dogs
It used to be that a priviledged few were allowed to inhabit the ivory tower. What’s cool about EMC is that you can join the company, step off the street, and your ideas can become just as relevant as anybody else’s.
So long as you raise your hand!
Steve
