Information Playground

Bridge Building: The Sixth Habit of Effective Intrapreneurs

This is the seventh in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

The first three habits (productivity, initiative, and collaboration) accelerate idea innovation in a corporation. The next two habits (3-Box time Management and Plus-2 Visibility) allow an intrapreneur to accelerate the development of the idea.

The most difficult habit remains!  “Bridges” (or bridge building) is depicted below as the next important step in the idea delivery process.

Intrapreneurs like to have their prototypes analyzed and chosen for funding. The ability to experiment while simultaneously delivering on Box 1 commitments is one of the hardest balancing acts of all.

Yet intrapreneurs find a way to keep their ideas alive using a variety of different techniques. They find a way to propose a new product while simultaneously delivering the old one. This habit, depicted below, builds a bridge from the old product to the new.

Intrapreneurs distribute their time among the three boxes on the left hand side of Figure 16. They are delivering Product X while simultaneously exploring new ideas and problems. They use the results of the work in Box 2 and Box 3 to build a bridge to a new product offering (Product Y in what becomes their next Box 1). Building the bridge takes a lot of work and a lot of time. It also may take a lot of people, and these people are typically busy with Box 1 activities of their own.

How, then, do intrapreneurs build the bridge? The answer lies in their unique ability to keep ideas alive by inspiring and then leveraging human capital. Intrapreneurs commonly leverage human capital from one of four areas:

1. Interns. College interns are a wonderful thing. They often do not show up in a business unit’s headcount. They are easier to hire than full-time employees, especially given the fact that they may only be available for a few short months. They are typically eager and productive. It is often less risky to have them work on something new (as opposed to relying heavily on them in Box 1). Interns are a great way to quickly build innovative new ideas, and the enthusiasm innate in intrapreneurs can be highly motivational for a college intern.
2. New employee training. New employees are often assigned to Box 1 activities. It typically takes new employees a while to get up to speed. Savvy intrapreneurs will take them in and help them to cut their teeth on some of the newer ideas. When introduced to Box 2 and Box 3 activities, the new hire may begin to mimic intrapreneurial behavior when they are ultimately moved into their own Box 1 job.
3. Outside of the business unit. Intrapreneurs are, by their very nature, collaborative. They are keenly aware of the work going on in other business units. They are quick to recognize slack in other organizations and present those employees with the opportunity to contribute to new ideas. These collaborations, of course, often involve engagements between two different intrapreneurs from separate business units. A well-connected intrapreneur will often look to pull in resources from field engineers, too. Anyone who looks even marginally underutilized is fair game.
4. Pitching co-ownership. Most people enjoy being a part of a successful endeavor. An intrapreneur motivates employees within their own business units by articulating the value of Product Y. Co-workers quickly realize the contributions made by intrapreneurs and recognize that by dedicating part of their own time to Box 2 and Box 3 in support of “their” intrapreneurs, they will be lining themselves up for the best work if and when Product Y is approved. If they participate in the beginnings of Product Y, they become known as the best candidates to kick off the formal development.

By applying the tenets of bridge building, the intrapreneur creates a volunteer team that, together, turns valuable ideas into marketable products. In the process, the intrapreneur serves as a mentor to many. The end result is a Product Y proposal that usually has the teeth and the legs to be adopted as a new direction in the organization, given that the intrapreneur has a strong track record on the seventh and final habit: they finish.

And finishing is intrinsically linked to the foundational habit of all intrapreneurs: productivity.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Plus-2 Visibility: The Fifth Habit of Effective Intrapreneurs

This is the sixth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

The previous habit (3-box time management) described the first step required to deliver upon an idea in a large corporation.

The next habit is an unusual and counter-intuitive technique that enables an intrapreneur to continue the delivery of their idea. Visibility management (often referred to as visibility avoidance) is depicted below as the next step in the cycle.

Visibility avoidance – not actively publicizing one’s talents – seems to be incongruent with climbing the corporate ladder. Doesn’t everybody want to be recognized for their great ideas and promoted to higher levels of responsibility?

Intrapreneurs, quite simply, need not. Their intrinsic passion for the generation and delivery of ideas is their main reason for coming to work every day. They fill their time with trips to the lab to debug alongside their teammates. They close themselves inside remote conferences rooms and collaborate on whiteboards. They spend hours on their laptops, searching high and low for new sources of learning on the latest technologies. They visit local customers to check on their configurations.

They are not motivated by rewards and recognition from others. They are rewarded by the process that they have created for themselves.

This sort of self-motivation does not leave a lot of time for the bureaucratic meetings that are so common at large corporations. Intrapreneurs who find themselves lassoed in these types of meetings recognize they are jeopardizing the core value that is the hallmark of any intrapreneur: productivity. They understand that certain forms of recognition by executive management are accompanied by the unwelcome trappings of inefficient assignments and endless, countless meetings.

While they eschew recognition by executives, they strive for visibility with the builders in the trenches.

As a result of maintaining the delicate balance between maximizing trench visibility and minimizing corporate visibility, many intrapreneurs have adopted a “plus 2” approach to recognition within the corporation. They create extremely strong bonds of trust with their direct manager, reinforced by their consistently exceeding performance expectations, and strive for an equally strong bond with their manager’s manager.

Any regular interaction with managers and executives higher than two levels above their current position is generally avoided. Building trust with the first two higher links in the management chain can accomplish two things:

1. It allows the management chain to run interference for the intrapreneur, which keeps the intrapreneur out of inefficient meetings.
2. It allows the management chain to advocate on behalf of the intrapreneur, which can advance those causes that require resource allocation outside of the business unit.

Why would the links on the plus-2 management chain go to these lengths to advance the cause of an intrapreneur? It comes down, once again, to the core trait of an intrapreneur: productivity. Corporate intrapreneurs have a track record of success. Their previous inventions became products that continue to generate revenue. People like to work with them, and they raise morale. Their management chain wants to keep them happy, and will typically do their best to eliminate corporate obstacles (or raise them to protect the intrapreneur’s time).

By adding plus-2 management to the practice of 3-Box time management, the intrapreneur can make great progress on the delivery of their idea. Eventually they will reach the stage where they are ready to request formal recognition and funding for their idea. This phase is referred to as “Bridge Building”, and will be described in a subsequent post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

3-Box Time Management: Fourth Habit of Intrapreneurs

This is the fifth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

The first three habits (productivity, initiative, and collaboration) are closely tied to idea generation.

The next three habits, when practiced properly at a corporation, can often lead to the successful delivery of ideas. Idea delivery is characterized by the creation of a product or service that provides value to a customer.

These first stages of delivery occur as part of a technique known as 3-box time management, which is depicted below.

Vijay Govindarajan (VG) is a Professor of International Business at Dartmouth College. He is the author and evangelist of the 3-box strategic approach to corporate innovation. Three-box innovation strategy dictates that the majority of corporate resources should be invested in the Box 1 diagram listed below: Manage the Present. This box represents the continued development of existing products to yield most of a corporation’s revenue. Employees supporting this box focus on existing customers and processes, and they continue to leverage their existing competencies. In essence, this box “funds” the development of innovation within a corporation. Some companies fall into the trap of spending close to 100 percent of their resources in this box.

Vijay advises corporations to allocate portions of their resources to Box 2 and Box 3 as well as tried-and-true Box 1. Box 2 selectively abandons the past by “forgetting” most of what is known about the products built in Box 1, including why they were built and whom they were built to satisfy. This break from tradition enables an innovator to take existing products into completely different markets.

Box 3 is a more radical approach to innovation. It completely ignores current processes and products and prominently targets the future.

The figure below applies this 3-box corporate framework to an intrapreneur’s use of his or her own time (note that the box titles change when applied to an individual).

Intrapreneurs can be most effective when they are delivering products as part of a business unit (as opposed to being a member of a research team in an ivory tower). Why? They often prefer to be in the trenches, where they can be highly productive, visiting customers, and collaborating with others. They are respected within their organizations for doing those very things.

Perhaps their most significant contribution to their business unit’s product line is funding their employment and that of their collaborators. They are squarely positioned in Box 1.

Spending all of their time in one area of expertise does not enable intrapreneurs to achieve success. Their natural curiosity and passion will not allow them to stay in only one place. They practice the discipline of limiting the amount of time they spend in Box 1.

By limiting the amount of time they spend in Box 1, intrapreneurs make time for Box 2 and/or Box 3 activities. They set aside the time to learn about customer issues. They set aside the time to explore adjacent technologies. They regularly meet with experts in adjacent fields and collaborate to dream up ideas of what might be possible. Most importantly, they begin to build out their ideas.

It is worth pointing out the difference between Box 2 and Box 3 intrapreneurial behavior. Box 2 behavior is characterized by Venn diagram innovation. The intrapreneur collaborates in the context of a well-defined customer problem.

Box 3 behavior is characterized by blue sky innovation: taking the initiative to learn new technologies and collaborate without necessarily starting with the context of a defined customer problem. Blue sky innovators may ask themselves and others, “What might this capability be used to do?” Answers to this question can result in breakthrough innovation. It is often the case that breakthrough innovation can be applied to customer problems they don’t yet know they have!

It is a difficult balancing act to regularly spend time outside of Box 1. It takes passion and persistence. But it is the very first step that a new intrapreneur must take to prove his or her worth!

Subsequent steps build on this important ability to manage one’s time well. The technique of intentionally limiting personal visibility is a non-obvious method to effectively focus intrapreneurial efforts. I will elaborate further on this next step in a future post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Collaboration: The Third Habit of Effective Intrapreneurs

This is the fourth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur. 

Productivity is the foundational attribute of an intrapreneur.  Initiative is a required next step. Neither of these attributes necessarily results in new ideas, and new ideas are of course an essential part of innovation.

New ideas are often generated during the third step, which is depicted below as collaboration.

Intrapreneurs are, by necessity, highly collaborative. The reason they practice Habit #2 (initiative) is because they fully recognize their need for new knowledge. They don’t know all of the problems their current (or future) customers are experiencing, and they lack comprehensive knowledge of an adjacent sphere of technology that just might light an innovative spark of how to solve a problem differently.

To overcome these limitations, intrapreneurs collaborate. Perhaps the best way to illustrate intrapreneurial collaboration is with an actual story. This story is from my industry (high-tech), but the pattern is applicable across a wide range of industries.

The e-book Innovate With Influence describes a collaborative effort to produce an idea that translated into multiple billions of dollars of product revenue. The idea was instrumental in giving rise to the adoption of disk array technology by mid-range corporations (one notch below enterprise customers in terms of size).

The idea was originally motivated by the need to solve the most important customer requirement of an information storage system: data integrity. In the 1980s, a new technology known as RAID had arisen. RAID used mathematical techniques to re-create information from failed disk drives. If the math was wrong, the customer would receive corrupt data. Customers wanted RAID because it was faster than any disk technology previously available.

Thousands of lines of new software had to be written to implement RAID. Dozens of failure permutations could impact RAID systems.

How could this software be tested to prove that the math never failed? The intrapreneur in this case was highly productive and an expert in RAID. He had taken the initiative to understand the customer sphere. The diagram below highlights the need for an intrapreneur to find an adjacent technology and collaborate.

In this case, the adjacent technology was a very robust testing framework. This framework already verified data integrity, but it did not have a specific solution for verifying RAID disk arrays. Employees in the two technology spheres collaborated on new functionality that inserted tortuous fault events at every mathematical calculation point. This tool became internally known as the disk array qualifier (DAQ). The resulting disk array, known as VNX®, achieved superior levels of quality that led to well over $12 billion of revenue generation in a 20-year period. The figure below depicts a Venn diagram of the DAQ solution.

These three circles represent the three basic habits of highly effective intrapreneurs. A highly productive employee becomes proficient in a particular expertise (in this case, RAID). The intrapreneur then takes the initiative to identify problems from the customer sphere (data integrity). Initiative spurs the search to find an applicable adjacent sphere (the test framework) and collaborate.

Collaboration between the two technologists yielded an innovative solution: the DAQ.

The next question becomes: how do you deliver upon new ideas?  The answer to this question will become more apparent in future posts.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Initiative: The Second Habit of Effective Intrapreneurs

This is the third in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur. In my last post I made the following assertion:

While an intrapreneur is necessarily a highly productive employee, not every highly productive employee is an intrapreneur.

The second step in the diagram below represents the most differentiable attribute of an intrapreneur: initiative.

Innovators are a naturally curious bunch. They take the initiative to wander outside of their sphere of expertise. They do not need a manager to provide a map because they are guided by technologies and problems about which they care passionately.

The diagram below depicts the two areas of initiative on which an intrapreneur typically focuses. The intrapreneur must take initiative in both areas; anything less decreases the chance for effective innovation.

The first (and most important) area of initiative is the entrance into the customer sphere. It’s important to be aware of the two classes of customer: external and internal.

In my corporation (EMC), external customers are the businesses or consumers that purchase the innovative, new high-tech products that are being built.

Internal customers are the individuals and teams that build, test, sell, and support these high-tech products.

Regardless of whether the customer is internal or external, the intrapreneur must leave the comfort of his or her sphere of expertise and listen closely to customer requirements and problem statements.

Requirements gathering is a normal and mandatory part of any high-tech product development cycle. What is different about the intrapreneurial approach? The primary difference is that the intrapreneur is driven by personal interest. He or she is asking solely because of personal curiosity, or because of a passion for a particular field.

The second area of initiative is the continual drive to learn new technologies, especially those that are in some way adjacent to the intrapreneur’s sphere of expertise. These self-guided investigations are most effective if they are driven by the exposure to customer problems and requirements. It is possible to explore new technologies outside of the context of customer requirements; this is called blue sky innovation. Customer requirements will often surface as the intrapreneur practices the third habit: collaboration.

Expertise, customer exposure, and adjacent technology are the holy trinity of intrapreneurial innovation.  This innovation approach is highly effective at large corporations and is also referred to as Venn Diagram innovation.

When productivity and initiative are combined with the next step (collaboration), ideas are produced. More to come on this topic in a future blog post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Productivity: The First Habit of Effective Intrapreneurs

This is the second in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur. These traits can be remarkably different from those that might be practiced by an entrepreneur working in a start-up environment.

The attribute of productivity is foundational to intrapreneurship, which is why it occupies the top position in this cyclical, seven-step chart.

How do intrapreneurs consistently deliver their ideas through the corporate maze of obstacles that are common at large companies? How do they become so influential?

The answer, of course, is that their track record of corporate productivity is stellar. If there is one thing that a corporation loves, it is an employee that delivers. In fact, the only thing that a corporation loves more is an employee that delivers early!

Great intrapreneurs deliver high-quality results that are ahead of schedule, even when given aggressive work assignments. They are dominant in their “sphere of expertise.” It takes months of hard work for an employee to become an expert in a given sphere.

I often advise college new hires to delay innovation activities in their first six to nine months on the job and focus instead of productivity. Deep technical knowledge is the jumping-off point for establishing an intrapreneurial track record.

While an intrapreneur is necessarily a highly productive employee, not every highly productive employee is an intrapreneur. Some productive employees like to work hard, establish a deep understanding of a technology, and then stay there. They are more than content to perpetually tweak and enhance their creations (or perhaps re-architect the same technology into a different form). This type of employee is indispensable for sustaining revenue generation from successful products. Without them, corporations could not fund newer, more innovative proposals.

Intrapreneurs, on the other hand, are productive but not satisfied to simply stay in their sphere. They remain in place long enough to deliver on their commitments, but they are intrinsically driven to create something new. They put into practice the second habit of intrapreneurs: initiative.

My next post will discuss initiative in more detail.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

The Seven Habits of Effective Intrapreneurs

As an inventor I have witnessed a fairly distinctive pattern of intrapreneurship within my own multi-national corporation (EMC).

The employees that are the most successful at advancing their ideas through the corporate maze tend to operate using a fairly well-defined rhythm. The chart below breaks down this rhythm into a set of discrete steps that can be learned and practiced by creative employees world-wide.

Although this diagram is cyclical, intrapreneurs-in-training cannot simply jump on at any given point in the cycle. It is imperative that their very first step be the practice and discipline of productivity. Intrapreneurs by their very nature are productive; they know how to produce new products or services based on their own ideas.

What separates an intrapreneur from the many productive employees that can be found in any corporation? The answer is that they continue to take initiative beyond their required duties.

Over the course of the next several weeks this blog will dive into these seven steps in detail. Many of these steps are already described in the book Innovate with Influence.

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Irish Cocoon

Several weeks ago I published a post called "Irish Butterfly". In that post I described how EMC's Innovation Showcase idea repository was mathematically analyzed and visually displayed. I shared how five "clusters" caught my eye. These clusters are depicted below.

I described how a deeper mathematical analysis of one of these clusters yielded a butterfly-shaped graph of two Irish cliques united by an Irish hub.

I retrieved the names of everybody on this graph, made a few phone calls, and sent a few emails. With each conversation I peeled back another layer of the onion and learned that the mathematical appearance of this cluster was no fluke. It was the result of an intentional effort to develop a highly scalable and repeatable innovation framework within the Ireland Center of Excellence (COE).

The Background

I had a phone conversation with Susan Pardoe, a member of Human Resources from the Ireland COE. Susan showed up as one of the nodes on the left-hand side of the graph. Susan mentioned that Ireland COE Vice President Bob Savage kicked off an Idea Generation Session with a statement that "things are moving so fast in our industry that we have to CONTINUALLY innovate to stay ahead of the game". She described a process whereby trained facilitators guided a cross-functional team in the generation of ideas.

The next person I contacted was the hub in the graph, Sandra O'Connor. I discovered that Sandra was one of eight trained facilitators within the Ireland COE. She wrote:

"Our ideas stemmed from an innovation facilitation course that I attended in January which was organized by Brendan Butler here to get the skills for helping ideas to form. In addition to facilitating some cross functional innovation brainstorming, I used the skills within our own area to mine for ideas for the innovation competition."

Her description answered all of my questions about the nature of the people on the graph. On the left-hand side is a set of cross-functional employees that participated in the original idea generation session. Sandra then facilitated the same process within her own team (the right hand side of the graph). As part of both facilitation efforts, Sandra entered the best ideas on behalf of the teams that generated them. The total idea count of these two cliques totaled 24.

The "hub" is a trained innovation facilitator. Fascinating!

My next interview was Brendan Butler (mentioned by Sandra as the organizer of the innovation initiative). Brendan serves a dual role as the Director of GPO Engineering as well as the Director of Ireland COE Innovation. Brendan was indeed asked by Bob Savage to form a scalable and repeatable innovation framework, and in January of this year he organized a two-day workshop to design the "funnel" process through which ideas would flow. One important result was the training of eight facilitators in the process of "Innovative Idea Generation".

Several months later, four sessions were held that generated 150 ideas, which were eventually funneled down to eight ideas presented to senior management. Other ideas were passed to business units, some were catalogued, and the remainder was rejected.

Global Impact

The butterfly graph showed up as part of EMC's global Innovation Showcase. How did Irish idea submitters fare overall in the contest?

First of all, idea submission from Ireland was up forty-six percent year-over-year. No other country submitted as many ideas.

Secondly, nine Irish ideas were selected for the final round. This means that out of sixty finalists (vying for 20 awards), 15% had Irish contributors.

And finally, 3 of the 20 awards were won by Irish idea submitters, again representing 15% of the total.

It Starts at the Top

In a recent post I highlighted how Executive Sponsorship is the critical ingredient for sustainable innovation initiatives:

"The average life expectancy of a New Ventures Group [ e.g. an Innovation Team] within an established, mature firm is approximately four years.  Senior leaders grow impatient with the seemingly low productivity in these groups and shut them down." (RPI Professor Gina O'Connor)

In Ireland, their innovation framework starts at the top. The COE management team launched a targeted innovation initiative and their employees followed through. Many ideas were gathered and vetted within an Irish cocoon several months before the butterfly appeared.  I view it as my job to promote their framework as a best practice. Thanks to everyone who helped me to understand it.

And thank you to the Data Scientist (EMC Distinguished Engineer John Cardente) that generated the visualization that brought me down this path!

There is more work to do. What are the stories behind those other clusters?

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Wordy Innovation

My company (EMC) just announced the award winning ideas that emerged from our yearly Innovation Showcase.  Global employees submitted 1,590 ideas in the June to August timeframe. In August, teams of judges from sponsoring organizations reviewed these ideas and selected three finalists (per organization).

One of the things I'd like to explore in this post is the concept of "judging bias". Before the judging process began my team distributed an article by the MIT Sloan School of Management called 'Is Your Company Choosing the Best Innovation Ideas" (I found a shorter version of this paper on InnovationTools.com).

Our advice to the judging teams came straight from the paper:

"Therefore, it’s essential for senior managers to understand the mechanisms at work when their staff evaluates one another’s ideas, so that executives can hone in on the ideas that will make a real difference to the organization as they move through the innovation funnel."

One of the "bias" categories that judges need to be aware of is "length of submission".  If an idea is too short, will judges dismiss it by assuming that the inventor didn't spend enough time?  Or if an idea is too long, will they dismiss it by categorizing it as too complex, or because it takes too much time to understand?  Consider this quote from the InnovationTools.com blog post:

"The length of an innovation proposal has a major influence on whether managers will select the idea for further consideration. The record shows that proposals that are too long or too short do not get the same level of consideration from managers as those that are the “right” length, given the particular environment. The optimal word length in the company I studied was about 250 words; other organizations will have different norms. The fact is, the lower-level managers who screen proposals are busy and have short attention spans. A proposal that is too long may be eliminated from further consideration irrespective of the potential merit of the idea; a long and turgid proposal frequently suffers from lack of focus. However, a skimpy proposal may also be an indication that the submission is in fact insufficiently thought through and fails to answer the basic questions."

I've written several posts highlighting how running analytics over innovation data (such as idea contests) can lead to broader insights into our corporate innovation culture.

So I asked EMC Distinguished Engineer John Cardente to try and generate a report that correlates "length of proposal" with "idea finalist". This report would answer the question: " For the 2011 EMC Innovation Showcase, did longer ideas or shorter ideas fair better?"

According to John, the answer is yes. Below are the estimated probability density functions of the proposal description lengths for finalists and non-finalists.

I asked John to explain density graphs:

"The density graph is more or less a histogram with infinitely small bins.  Like a histogram, the bumps and dips indicate how the distribution of proposal lengths varies with size. The density (y axis) is scaled such that the area under each curve sums to 1. 

Both the finalist and non-finalist density curves peak below 500 characters. However, the finalist peak is much smaller with the remaining area spread over the larger character counts. This results in the finalist curve being taller than the non-finalist curve at higher character counts indicating that finalist proposals were generally longer.

While the density plot shows that finalist proposals were generally longer, it doesn't tell us if the difference is significant or just due to chance. That's the purpose of the t-test, it tells us that the difference statistically significant and not due to chance alone. "

John used R to perform the t-test to determine if the difference is statistically significant. The table below shows the results.

 
On average, the length of a finalist's submission was 827 words (much higher than the average of 506 for a non-finalist).  John puts these results in context:

"Since the 95% confidence ranges don't overlap, it can be said that the description length is a statistically significant difference between finalists and non-finalists. This doesn't prove causality but it does suggest that longer descriptions are beneficial."

I personally judged a large number of ideas, and as I look back on the experience I recall that longer submissions tended to stimulate more possibilities for idea incubation.  Shorter submissions left me wondering, and in those cases I often left a comment for the inventor as a way of gaining more context (which may lead to bias when other judges view the idea!).

What can come from displaying this data?  For inventors, this year's results may lead to longer and more thoughtful submissions in 2012.  For sponsors, this data may cause them to introduce word count limits on idea submissions. For judges, it may serve as a catalyst to do more digging on shorter-length ideas (to make sure that better ideas are not unduly ignored).

Are there related analytics that may suggest other changes?  I am wondering about the correlation between submission date and finalist status.  Do finalists typically submit ideas later in the contest window? If so would this mean that their ideas are more mature (and perhaps longer in length)?

I look forward to covering this more deeply in future posts.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Innovation Watershed: How My Career Changed

wa·ter·shed [waw-ter-shed, wot-er-shed]  

an important point of division or transition between two phases, conditions, etc.

How far has EMC's Innovation Conference come in five years?  Judging by the lineup of Executive speakers at this year's event, we've come a long way:

• EMC President and Chief Operating Officer Pat Gelsinger
• Senior Vice President and EMC Chief Technology Officer Jeff Nick
• EMC Executive Vice President of Human Resources Jack Mollen.
• EMC Chief Strategy Officer Mark Lewis.
• President of EMC's Information Intelligence Group Rick Devenuti.
• President of EMC's Backup and Recovery Systems Division BJ Jenkins.
• Greenplum Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Luke Lonergan.
• EMC Chief Sustainability Officer Kathrin Winkler.
• Sun Co-Founder Scott McNealy.

Companies that start "Innovation Teams" usually find that these teams dry up and vanish after 3-4 years. Consider this quote from RPI Professor Gina O'Connor (brackets are mine):

"The average life expectancy of a New Ventures Group [ e.g. an Innovation Team] within an established, mature firm is approximately four years.  Senior leaders grow impatient with the seemingly low productivity in these groups and shut them down."

One of the main reasons she cites for disbanding corporate innovation activities is lack of Executive support.

We don't have that problem.

Successful innovation efforts often point to a portfolio of "inventions" that have impacted the company. We have many such stories (I hope to profile them in future posts).

In this post, however, I'll focus on another side-effect of a great corporate innovation program: changed careers.

Pre-2007

I didn't need my company to tell me how to innovate (or so I thought). I had spent my entire career working on teams that delivered cool ideas. My daily routine was show up, work hard, and go home. I didn't have time for corporate activities outside of my business unit. 

In the summer of 2007 I received an email from EMC CTO Jeff Nick announcing an Innovation Contest. I could not believe my eyes. For those of us buried deep inside our business units, the invitation amounted to a complete waste of time. Many people rolled their eyes, pushed the delete button, and went back to work.

I tried to do that, but for some reason I started thinking about ideas that I'd long desired to build. These ideas always ended up on the back burner because they were usually outside the scope of my day job. To make a long story short, I decided to participate in the contest and attended the first annual Showcase in October of 2007. 

The 2007 Conference

After more than seven years at EMC I finally took a day off to consider innovation.

I was encouraged to fly way, way out of my comfort zone.

Perhaps the best message I received that day was delivered by none other than Chuck Hollis.  Chuck got right up into our faces at the Innovation Conference and challenged us to become involved in social media and start blogging.

People were incredulous. Blogging was a complete waste of time, more silly perhaps than corporate idea contests!

Why would EMC Executives spend so much money flying inventors in from all around the world to listen to a clown like Chuck say something so ridiculous?

What I discovered that day was that my company was trying to tell me something:

Innovate at the Corporate Level. It's better than your day job.

P.S. Don't ask permission.

Post-conference Results

I decided to give the blogging thing a try.

I took a few days off every month and started visiting universities.

I became interested in stimulating innovation overseas. I went to Russia three times, and Cairo once.

I wrote a couple of books.

I started volunteering for the Innovation Conference Steering Committee.

I attended the World Innovation Forum in New York City (twice).

I continued to innovate, and helped launch the new Unisphere and VNXe products.

And I'm having more fun than ever.

A watershed is an important transition between two phases. My post-2007 involvement with EMC's innovation activities brought me down a new path. In 2011 I left my career as a software engineer completely behind and became the Director of EMC's Innovation Network. My team and I sponsor and guide the implementation of the Innovation Conference and Showcase, the Fellow and Distinguished Engineer community, global university research, etc., etc., etc.

The 2007 Innovation Conference was my personal catalyst. My decision to innovate at the corporate level was the right one to make.

I find it surreal that today I'll share the stage with the likes of Pat Gelsinger, Jeff Nick, and Scott McNealy. I've got my speech all planned out.

I have a pretty simple message.

Turn today into a watershed moment!

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network