Information Playground

Evolutionary Topic Modeling

I've been studying EMC innovation data from the last five years and have enlisted internal data scientists to help improve our global innovation processes.

In a previous post I described how one data scientist used Topic Modeling to learn which topics generate the highest idea submission count from global employees.

Another interesting area of analysis is to visualize topic trends over time. For example, what were employees thinking about in regards to cloud and big data over the last few years? The Stanford topic modeling toolkit allows data scientists to answer these types of questions. The following graph shows topic variance over the last three years of our Showcase.

In my last post I mentioned that Topic 22 represented employee engagement, and clearly this topic peaked in 2011.  Big Data is represented by Topic #4, and Cloud is represented by Topic #9.

Employees have consistently submitted 60 ideas per year related to cloud computing.  Their ideas, however, evolved in ways that are fairly consistent with important cloud trends (e.g. hybrid clouds). Consider the commonly used words from this topic, and their evolution from 2009 to 2011.

For Big Data, the 2010 acquisition of Greenplum by EMC had a significant impact on the submission by employees in 2011.

How can the company best leverage this view into the thoughts of global innovators? 

The first strategy is to create compelling innovation events and communications that focus on trending, popular topics. Our idea repository contains a list of inventors that contributed to a given topic, along with a list of the words that they use most often. Both pieces of data can be used to arrange brainstorming sessions and invite the right participants on the most relevant topics.

A second strategy is to watch for new topics that are not on the corporate radar. These "gaps" coming from the wisdom of the crowd could be surfaced to the executive level as potential new directions.

In future posts I will explore other views that EMC data scientists are providing on the important topic of innovation and corporate strategy. Thanks to EMC Data Scientist Tao Chen on the EMC Labs China team for the supporting data on this post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Innovation and Topic Modeling

EMC has a number of data scientists that are part of EMC Labs China. They have been experimenting with different analytics packages as part of our efforts to characterize and improve the creative culture across our global innovation ecosystem.

One of the tools which has yielded great insight is the Stanford Topic Model Toolbox, which is defined as follows:

The TMT brings topic modeling tools to social scientists and others who wish to perform analysis on datasets that have a substantial textual component

Our innovation database has ~6,000 employee ideas submitted over a five year time period as part of EMC's annual Innovation Showcase. In the context of our Showcase, topic modeling yields insight into:

1. The underlying semantic structure of idea submissions.
2. The overall abstract topics represented by the idea submissions.

Data Scientist Tao Chen (EMC Labs China) ran a topic modeling algorithm to divide ideas up into twenty-five different abstract topics. The chart below displays a "sum of documents" from 2011:

This chart essentially breaks down idea submissions into twenty-five different categories. From this chart it is clear that Topic 22 represents an area that generated the most ideas. The toolkit allows for a programmer to dive down into each topic and see the "word scoring" for that particular topic. Topic 22 has the following word breakdown:

The most common topic submitted by EMC employees was related to employee engagement, productivity, and benefits. In other words, EMC employees had quite a bit of interest in their relationship to their corporation.

As the Showcase organizer, I could potentially use this fact to generate more interest in the next Showcase (e.g. ask for more ideas that are specifically related to the topic of employee engagement, productivity, and benefits).

EMC is a high-tech company. What are the most relevant technical ideas coming from the employees? And how do they evolve year-over-year?

I will attempt to answer these questions (via topic modeling) in an upcoming post.

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

Irish Butterfly

In recent posts I have been describing the use of analytics within EMC to identify cliques of innovators. These innovators generated a high number of idea submissions as part of our 2011 Innovation Showcase.

The chart below identifies five large clusters. The leftmost cluster (indicated by the arrow) will be the subject of this post.

I asked EMC Distinguished Engineer John Cardente to use R to generate a social network graph of just this cluster:

This graph tells us several things:

• Each node in the graph represents a person that submitted an idea.
• Each node is labeled with the number of ideas that each person submitted.
• The cluster consists of two cliques.
• These two cliques are united by a common "hub".

I asked John to further explain the concept of "hubs" to me:

"The graph clearly shows the two cliques, one on the right and the other on the left. However, it also shows that they are connected by a central “hub”. In this case, the hub also submitted the most contest entries. This is an interesting finding as it suggests that such hubs may be an important factor in growing large innovation cliques. How, then, to identify hubs?

Another social network analysis metric is betweenness, a measure of a node’s importance to the connectivity of a graph. Hubs are generally characterized as nodes having a large number of connections (degree) and high betweenness. Using R, it’s possible to compute both metrics (degree and betweenness) for each contest participant. This helps to identify the EMC employees currently playing a large role in creating innovation networks. The goal is to grow these employees through support and mentorship and leverage them to further expand EMC’s innovation networks."

This butterfly graph came with a list of names attached to each node. I began to do initial research into each clique. Here is some of what I learned:

• These cliques are Irish!  All of the idea submitters work as part of EMC's Ireland Center of Excellence (COE).
• The employees from the larger clique all belong to the same division (Logistics), while employees from the clique on the left span multiple divisions, including HR, Sales, Manufacturing, and Facilities (to name a few).
• The clique on the right generated a variety of ideas that are all related to improving communities, from career growth for employees, to improved communication with our customers, to partnering with local museums.
• The members of the other clique all submitted the same three ideas together. For this clique, each idea has a similar  theme: "How do we improve the impressions that our customers get when they visit our facility"?

I am fairly impressed with the volunteerism exemplified by these employees!  What made this particular set of people decide to band together for the good of the company?  How can this type of behavior be extended to other geographies? Is it possible to connect the inventors in this clique to other relevant individuals/teams within the company?

These questions can only be answered by connecting with the members of the cliques themselves (I've already started arranging some meetings).

In future posts I hope to dive into the motivations behind some of the larger cliques that have emerged in this year's Innovation Showcase.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

 

 

The Bigger the Clique

I'm writing a series of posts about the use of analytics to improve the innovation capacity of my company (EMC).  My team is running a yearly Innovation Conference and Showcase that has resulted in 1,590 ideas arriving from around the world. On Nov 30th in Santa Clara, the Chief Technology Officer of EMC (Jeff Nick) will announce the ideas that will receive incubation funding in 2012.

The database that contains all of the idea submissions represents valuable intellectual property, but the social graphs that lie hidden within the database represent something of great importance as well.

In social network analysis (SNA), a clique is a group where each member has a direct relationship with the other members. For the Innovation Showcase database, this means that the clique members all submitted at least one idea together.  Using R, it's possible to identify the cliques in the contest's social network. To start, let's analyze the clique sizes by plotting them in a histogram.

John Cardente, a newly appointed EMC Distinguished Engineer, is responsible for the Innovation Showcase analytics that I've been sharing in recent posts. He's been doing this work in his spare time to pursue an interest in data science. I asked him to investigate the contest's social network to identify "cliques" of innovators. Here's what he found.

"The clique histogram is similar to the team size histogram shared in a previous post. This makes sense as cliques are essentially teams. However, a comparison of the two histograms reveals that there are fewer cliques than teams. This suggests that many cliques submitted multiple ideas. This raises two questions. How many ideas did each clique submit and did larger or smaller cliques generate more ideas? The following chart attempts to answer both questions."

"Each dot is one of the 260 cliques in the contest's social network. The X position is the clique's size while the Y position is the number of contest entries submitted by only its members, either all together or in sub-cliques. A small random value has been added to each dot's X and Y position to avoid over plotting (this is known as a jitter plot).

The orange line is a LOESS regression model fitted to the data. The gray band around the orange line is the LOESS model's 95% confidence interval.

This chart shows that cliques of all sizes submitted a large number of contest entries. However, the orange line's upward slope suggests that larger cliques tended to submit more entries and therefore exhibited a higher level of innovation."

John's conclusion that larger cliques produce higher submission rates leads me to ask further questions:

• Do larger cliques producing "better" ideas (e.g. were they selected as finalists)?
• Are large cliques all in one geography?
• Do large cliques tend to submit ideas that have a common theme?
• Do large cliques contain employees from different functional teams, or are they in a common organization?

How do we prioritize where to go next with the analysis?  My overall goal is to improve and increase EMC's organic innovation capacity. I've decided to base my next steps on something I learned from MIT Professor Sandy Pentland during last week's EMC Conference on International Collaboration. According to Sandy, one of the more common ways that people change their behavior is via "copying" (think iPod sales). People observe behavior that is appealing and copy it.

I'd like non-participating EMC employees to submit more ideas (between 1-2% participate). This means that a behavioral change must occur. From this thinking a strategy emerges.

Identify the large cliques.

Reach out to the team members.

Validate their importance to the company.

Ask them to keep going.

This week John sent me a "butterfly" graph that shows two large cliques that happened to be connected by a "hub" inventor.  I'll dive into this graph in a future post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

Who are These People?

In my corporation (EMC) we are currently running a global idea conference (the annual Innovation Showcase) that has generated 1,590 unique ideas.  I've written several posts about our use of analytics to gain further insight into how EMCers innovate.  In particular, we use social network analysis (SNA) to determine if we have passionate clusters of inventors.

I look at the chart below and wonder to myself: "Who are these people"?

As the Director of EMC's Innovation Network, the employees that cluster together to submit ideas into our Innovation Showcase are a mystery to me. The tool that generates this chart has informed me that there is a high-correlation between having your idea chosen as a finalist and having a strong social network. However, I don't know their names, I don't know who they are friends with, I don't know where they sit, and most importantly, I don't know what they are talking about!

In short, I don't know much!  But I plan on finding out.

And I'm getting some help from a local university.

Believe it or not, the process of analyzing a corporate social map for influential innovators is a growing area of research.

It's called Coolhunting.

Last week, my innovation team and I hosted a day-long summit at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We invited top technologists from all of our global R&D locations in Ireland, Russia, Israel, China, Egypt, and Cairo. We also invited those EMC Fellows and Distinguished Engineers that have displayed a passion for international innovation.  MIT Data Scientist Sandy Pentland spoke to us about innovation in the context of human behavior. MIT Research Scientist George Westerman discussed "Six S Incubation", a corporate framework for significantly accelerating incubation within a company. UMASS Boston Professor Duc Tran discussed Socially-Aware Storage Systems.

The Professor with the most relevance to my problem, however, was MIT Professor Peter Gloor. Peter is a co-author of the book "Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing". To quote from Peter's book:

"We have been able to discover social group networking structures that are indicative of high performance or high creativity."

Coolhunting is about finding those innovators that play a central role in the corporate innovation ecosystem.  Peter argues that if you have an accurate social graph, the job of coolhunting is a matter of simple math.

As part of my job I oversee quite a bit of university research. Most of it is related to advancements in computer science and/or high-tech capabilities. Our research topic with the MIT Media Lab, however, is focused on how we innovate as a corporation. The research that we have brought into the company via this partnership is starting to have a fairly profound impact.

For the Coolhunting research, the hardest part is the generation of the social graph. Most companies don't have one.

In our case, we do (I'd be happy to share how we generate ours).

So the question remains: Who are these people?

You and I are about to find out.

Steve Todd

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

 

Global Cooperation via Competition

One of the unique aspects of the global idea contest that EMC runs each year is the fact that it is a competition fostering global collaboration.  In 2011, hundreds of employee ideas are competing to win one of twenty-one sponsored awards.

The contest is an effort to grow new lines of business, create new services,implement new business processes, and/or propose new products.

On the other hand, however, the contest has a goal of “fostering global collaboration”. In a previous post I highlighted EMC’s use of analytic software to highlight “clusters” of employees that leverage collaboration to increase the odds of becoming a finalist.

The chart below is a look at the global span of the competition. From June through August employees from multiple countries enter their ideas into a common idea portal. The circles below indicate how many ideas originated from the specific country highlighted on the map.

 

One interesting point to make about this graph is the high participation counts coming from Ireland (358) and India (323). One theory that explains this result is the fact that in 2010 Ireland hosted EMC’s yearly Innovation Conference. India hosted it in 2009. The Conference is a day-long innovation event held at different global locations. One location is chosen to “host” EMC’s Chief Technology Officer (Jeff Nick), who announces the “Best in Show and Winning Ideas” during a broadcast that is streamed live to multiple locations. The hosting of this conference is a significant event and the chart above shows that employees at hosting locations continue their high level of participation in subsequent years.

Twenty-one EMC business units sponsored idea challenges during this year’s event (winners will be announced at the end of November). These business units range from Sales, to Human Resources, to product divisions, to Diversity and Inclusion, and to EMC’s Sustainability team. Each business unit promotes the best ideas to the level of “finalist”. These finalists are invited to make a live presentation to the judges of each business unit in an attempt to “win” the sponsor’s commitment to incubate the idea in 2012.

One of the pieces of data that is most interesting to measure from an analytics standpoint is the global locations of the finalists for a given award.  EMC’s Greenplum (database) division sponsored a challenge asking employees to come up with new use cases that are relevant to the database market.

In this example the Greenplum division selected a finalist from China, two from India, one from Ireland, two from Russia, and one from the United States. These finalists are often asked to join together into teams and make a joint presentation to the sponsors.

The use of analytics to comb through this data is a validation that the goal of global collaboration between employees is being achieved.  In future posts I’ll discuss how these teams of individuals receive “coaching” from EMC marketing consultants as a way of putting their best foot forward when selling their idea.

Steve Todd

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

World Analytics

In a recent post I described the use of analytics to uncover insights into how my corporatioin (EMC) sponsors organic innovation around the globe.

For this post I'd like to dive a little bit further into some data that one of our Distinguished Engineers generated via his use of the "R" analytics platform.

During this year's annual Innovation Showcase, EMC received 1,590 ideas from global employees. Out of these 1,590 ideas, 357 of them were submitted by a team (as opposed to an individual). My last post discussed the theory that team submissions have a better chance at being selected as a finalist within EMC.

The chart above is our attempt to dive further into this theory.

Each circle in the graph represents an idea submitter that was part of a team (i.e. more than one submitter on an entry). Gray lines between circles represent team relationships - two circles connected by a line indicate that those participants submitted an entry together. The size of each circle represents the associated participant's number of contest entries. Orange circles represent contest participants with an entry selected as a finalist.

The graph is showing clusters of idea collaborators. The fact that there are a fair number of large clusters suggests the presence of "healthy" innovation networks. The large circles at the "center" of the clusters suggest that there are prolific innovators that are building networks around them. Finally, the orange circles suggest that a fair portion of these influential people are generating good ideas relevant to the business (since they're finalists).

Action Plan = Stimulate Collaboration

Our team has done a fair bit of financial analysis on award winners from previous years. In many cases the revenue growth (or cost savings) of their implemented ideas has totaled multiple millions of dollars. Often times the ideas that generated these amounts were not award winners. They were simply the result of collaboration around an idea.

Each cluster in the graph above represents a "community" that has a passion for ideas with a certain theme. In the context of EMC, this theme may represent a research topic or customer need in any number of strategic directions: Big Data, automation, flash technology, etc.

Our analytics experts can take any given cluster, identify the names within that cluster, and generate a "cloud tag" that lets us know what general themes that they are talking about. These themes usually map to a set of experts within the corporation that may or may not be involved with the ideators. An introduction can be made between the experts and the ideators, and the concept can be taken to the next level. This can happen organically without the need for heavy processes.

Our growing awareness of "passionate clusters" of global innovators has caused us to roll out a new program within EMC called "Teach the Research". This program is a follow-on of our existing practice of holding global "Virtual Brownbags" that focuses on the sharing of innovation and research activity around the world.

In future posts I will explain further about our implementation of the "Teach the Research" program, and also drill down further into what our global analytics is teaching us.

Steve Todd

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network

 

EMC Innovation Conference: Retrospective Analytics

One of the benefits of running an Innovation Conference at a high-tech company (EMC) is that my team and I get free access to top technologies and top technologists.

We’ve started to use both of these assets to greater understand the dynamics of our innovation culture across the world.

November 30^th of this year marks the 5^th anniversary of EMC’s Annual Innovation Conference and Showcase (we’re celebrating by inviting Sun co-founder Scott McNealy to give the keynote). The Conference is about socialization (gathering to discuss and compare innovation best practices), while the Showcase is about materialization (presenting and celebrating the best ideas and their resulting implementations). The chart below highlights the growth and momentum that the Conference has experienced.

 

The five-year anniversary has certainly been a cause for introspection, and my team has found that there is no better way to introspect than to analyze the mountains of data that we’ve generated over the years. There are many technologies that we use in this process:

• We use our own Documentum search and index tools to catalog every single idea submitted to the Innovation Showcase from 2007 to 2011.
• We use our own Greenplum as a database to store key research and innovation data from around the company.
• We use EMC majority-owned VMware to virtualize our incubation environment for ideas that are “Best in Show”.

What I’d like to highlight in this post, however, is our use of the open-source “R” analytics platform to take a deep-dive into the ideas repository that holds worldwide employees ideas.  In the first of several posts on this topic, I’d like to highlight a key insight that has been enabled by the use of these technologies. The chart below indicates that nearly 80% of employee ideas were submitted “solo” (only one inventor named on the idea).

 

A similar analysis was run describing the team sizes of those ideas that were selected as FINALISTS (71 ideas out of 1590).

 

The numbers indicate that less than 60% of the finalists were solo artists. Does this mean that it’s better to collaborate with somebody else if you want to submit a higher quality idea? And if so, is the data saying that the ideal team size is between 2-6 persons?  For this small sample size, I would lean towards “yes”.  The data caused me to pull out my slide from the original Innovation Conference many years ago and recall Objective #1:

 

Collaboration is rewarded by a trip to the finals!

How about the “unite employees globally” objective?  We’ve analyzed the global nature of employee submissions, and I’ll highlight some of the insightful results in future posts. As a teaser, however, I’ll share one final slide which highlights the global span of Conference Locations in 2011 (16) and a breakdown of where the ideas are coming from. Enjoy!

 

Steve Todd

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Director, EMC Innovation Network