I think I'm fortunate that I get to meet with people on a broad range of topics -- and not necessarily just IT stuff, either :)
The appeal of "innovation" as a topic of executive discussion is near-universal: the more competitive your business, the more you care about fostering all forms of innovation within your ranks.
EMC is generally seen as a successful company, operating at global scale in an incredibly fast-moving and competitive industry. How we think about important topics (such as innovation) can often be instructive to others who are grappling with similar challenges -- albeit in a different context.
This Wednesday, EMC kicks off its 5th annual Innovation Conference. Although the event itself is quite impressive in its own right, it's far more impressive as just one component of an overall approach to innovation across many fronts.
Rather than simply beat our chests about how innovative we think we might be, we prefer to take a more serious approach and try to share with our customers and partners how we view the innovation challenge, what we've done about it, and the lessons we've learned in the process.
And I've found there are more than a few tidbits here for other corporate leaders who recognize the importance of fostering innovation across their enterprises.
What Makes This Important For EMC
Imagine you had to compete in an industry where (a) new innovations became commoditized almost overnight, (b) you were up against literally billions of dollars of external venture capital and corporate R&D, and (c) there were many thousands of very smart people outside of your company spending every waking hour trying to beat you at your own game.
That's the world EMC lives in.
Making matters even more challenging at larger companies is that success at scale tends to stifle many forms of innovation: the natural organizational tendency is to invest time in getting better at what made you successful in the past vs. investing in potentially new, disruptive and controversial innovations.
It's one area where start-ups can have a decided advantage -- unless there's a consistent and sustained effort to overcome these natural tendencies.
At EMC, we take the topic of innovation very seriously indeed. Although we're by no means perfect, we've learned a few things along the way that others have found useful.
Innovation In The Broader Sense
Since we're in the technology business, most people would tend to assume that by "innovation", we're talking about fundamental new technologies that change the game -- what I call the "silver bullet" model of innovation.
While that's undoubtedly important to us, the potential "innovation canvas" available is far, far larger -- and perhaps more impactful.
For example, various technologies can be combined and integrated in clever ways to address entirely new problems, for example.
There's very broad opportunity to innovate around new ways to engage with our customers and partners. Our internal business processes and practices are an evergreen opportunity for innovation and improvement. And, yes, there are all sorts of tantalizing adjacent markets that EMC could potentially play in :)
When I'm asked about how EMC approaches the whole topic of innovation, I tend to simplify my answer into three parts:
- "bottoms up" enablement of individuals and teams
- "tops down" strategic investments in innovation
- and a few key programs that connect the two themes
This year's EMC Innovation Conference is the prime example of the last category: a highly visible strategic investment into fostering individual and team innovation.
Empowering and Enabling Individuals To Innovate
Corporate culture can be a squishy thing, but incredibly important when it comes to creating an environment where people are encouraged to innovate.
Different parts of the EMC organization express this in different ways, but -- fairly uniformly -- just about everyone does what they can to create an informal environment where new thinking is encouraged.
For core technology engineers, one of the "markers" is how many patents you've applied for or have been granted: not a perfect measure of innovation, but a decent proxy.
Across the organization, the good managers at EMC leave enough time in meetings for a little unstructured brainstorming, or -- better -- hold dedicated ideation sessions around important problem statements. Better ideas are routinely assigned to small teams to go work and develop. It's not an isolated phenomenon -- it's almost everywhere.
Our internal social platform -- EMC|ONE -- does a nice job of slicing across the org chart and geography, connecting like minds around shared topics of interest. With 50,000+ employees here, there's a decent chance that you're not the only one who cares about a particular topic -- and has something to offer.
The discussion on this platform -- and other internal platforms -- is characteristically very transparent and authentic. You can easily get a feel for what's really going on, and how all the moving pieces might play with each other. There's plenty of organizational context readily available for anyone thinking about a new idea or a new approach.
Better context == more relevant innovations, as I've found.
On a more informal note, in my world it's common practice to pick up the phone, drop by someone's office, draft an email, etc. and share a few unfinished thoughts. Nothing specific may come out of it, but the practice of sharing and engaging with people's ideas is part of our everyday job here.
The classic example comes in situations when someone (justifiably) complains that things aren't working right and need to be improved. If you're new here, you might be unprepared for the likely response: how would you improve things, and -- more importantly -- what are you doing about it?
A few diagnostic questions for you to consider:
- Is there a culture of ideation and discussion in your organization? Do people make time for it, encourage it, praise it, etc.?
- Do you have a "no walls" social platform where like minds can meet and greet, irrespective of topic or function?
- Do managers make time in team meetings for brainstorming and collaborative problem solving?
- Are new ideas considered precious things -- even if they don't work out?
If your goal is to improve the innovation profile for your company, this is the "fertile ground" you'll need for more formal innovation programs. Put differently, I don't think there's any formal tops-down innovation program that can grow great ideas on barren earth.
Strategic Investments in Innovation
I don't know why so many people out there look at strategic M&A as non-innovative: we see it precisely the opposite. When we acquire a company, we're essentially acquiring really good ideas that are just starting to gain traction in the marketplace, not to mention the bright and passionate people who came up with those ideas and made them work in the marketplace.
Yes, you can "buy" innovation, but there's more.
The tricky part is not crushing what you bought -- it's just so easy for the culture of a larger corporation to extinguish what made the smaller acquisition target so successful. With over 50+ EMC acquisitions (many seen as successful), I think we've begun to master the trick of not breaking what you bought.
Once the acquired group has established their footing, so to speak, there's even more potential: hybridizing their ideas and perspectives with the incredibly broad spectrum of like-minded people already here at EMC.
We have one of the world's largest and most interesting technology toyboxes in the industry, and there's always room for a few more interesting toys :)
There's also a lot of innovative benefit from having an established M&A function -- even if you don't buy a lot of companies -- because you learn an awful lot by being exposed to this vibrant community. The same is true from the deep technology partnerships sponsored by Jeff Nick and our CTO organization. I wish I could share more about the cool things we come up with by integrating our technologies with the capabilities of our strategic partners, but unfortunately I can't :(
What's important here is that these efforts represent a large and continuing corporate investment in innovation -- and in a form that many people don't really consider.
The corollary innovation model to acquiring companies here at EMC is the internal incubator: a walled-off set of internal resources pointed at a new opportunity that the mainstream organization isn't set up to pursue.
Incubators are run like little internal companies: dedicated engineering, marketing, sales, support, etc. Many of them have been quite successful; a few didn't really turn out as we had hoped. Either way, though, I think we win.
For example, if you've heard about EMC's Project Lightning, that's just one of the incubators currently running at EMC right now. EMC's Centera and Atmos products are examples previous incubators (among many) that resulted in healthy and viable products outside of EMC's traditional strengths at the time.
Going even deeper, you'll find informal variations of the incubator model scattered across various EMC groups: small groups of walled-off resources pursuing a new idea that isn't 100% in lockstep with what the group is doing today.
What I like about this approach is that there's clear recognition that most business processes are built around perpetuating existing business models vs. creating new ones; hence the need to invest in organizing differently for innovation.
Connecting The Two: The EMC Innovation Conference
So, on one hand, we've got a healthy, vibrant environment where individuals and small teams are encouraged to innovate. And, on the other hand, we've got a track record of opening up our checkbook and investing heavily in big chunks of innovation.
The two approaches meet in a fascinating event: the EMC Innovation Conference.
At a high level, it's easy to understand. There's an extended global competition for the best ideas. Winners get funding and resources to take their idea forward, plus all sorts of glory heaped on them. Runners-up get the chance to work with others to refine their ideas, gain valuable feedback and exposure, and -- of course -- prepare for next year's competition!
The majority of the action during the year is on EMC's internal social platform. The "event" is actually a global link-up across multiple locations where participants meet and share.
The statistics are impressive, to say the least. This year, we have 1590 ideas officially submitted for evaluation, representing teams that span 25 countries. The live event itself will span 15 countries and will probably attract north of 2000+ engaged EMC participants for the duration.
All of the submissions are viewable (and commentable) by anyone in the organization -- I spent several hours cruising there, and came away with a lot of interesting things to go think about :)
The big innovation (!) for this year's event is "sponsored" competitions: various EMC functions have sponsored contests around specific problem areas and use cases that matter to them: e.g. customer service, marketing, manufacturing and so on -- an interesting take on crowdsourcing.
The core team behind the event is always justifiably proud of past year's winning ideas being carried forward -- and documenting the resulting economic impact to EMC.
What I always find surprising is the outrageous economic impact from ostensibly "small" (e.g. focused) ideas put into practice. My natural bias is that big ideas are obviously required for big impact; unfortuantely, the data proves me wrong :)
Besides the quantifiable economic benefits of the program, there's the hard-to-quantify but undeniable benefit that results from periodically firing up the competitive and creative juices of thousands of bright and passionate EMC employees around the globe. The enthusiasm levels at these events is downright infectious.
The Team Behind The Magic
Such a far-reaching and impactful program doesn't appear from thin air: there's always a dedicated team behind the scenes, which is essentially a corporate investment in talent and resources in itself.
The original program was conceived by Jeff Nick and the CTO office team; Burt Kaliski drove the program very successfully for the first few iterations.
More recently our own Steve Todd has taken the reins to drive the program even further, complemented by a stellar team who are just as passionate about this topic as Steve himself.
If you're not familiar with Steve, you might want to be. Besides being a formidable innovator in his own right, he is quite fascinated with the processes and behaviors around organizational innovation, and is actively applying many of his insights to his own personal petri dish: EMC Corporation. His blog is chock-full of interesting insights around fostering organizational innovation -- worth a read if you're interested.
In particular, he's now starting to use analytics to understand more about the process of ideation in EMC's environment. Fascinating stuff, if you ask me.
Want To Follow Along?
Another new wrinkle this year is the thoughtful use of social media: doing our best to share the excitement and the discussion externally -- while at the same time attempting to preserve a modicum of confidentiality. The hashtags we'll be using starting on Wednesday are #EMC #Innovation.
I'll be interested to see what gets tweeted -- and what doesn't :)
The Challenge Of "Innovating Innovation"
If you're in a competitive business, you care about innovation -- the more competitive you are, the more you care.
Sure, it'd be nice if we could provide shrink-wrap answers for all of our customers -- but we can do is transparently share how we've approached the innovation challenge, where we've invested, and the results we've seen. As you can see, there's no "single answer" here -- just a comprehensive, multi-dimensional and sustained commitment to fostering innovation in many forms and in many ways.
Even though I think EMC does an exceptional job on this topic, I'm also quite sure that what EMC does is not entirely unique -- and that there are probably better approaches out there.
If you're aware of interesting approaches to this fundamental challenge, I'd encourage you to share here -- either with a comment or a link.
Because it's definitely a topic that we all could benefit from :)
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