I've been following with great interest the formation of EMC's latest Center of Excellence (COE), the Egyptian COE in Cairo. From time to time I take a peek at what kind of jobs they are advertising for.
I'm on the Steering Committee for EMC's Annual Innovation Conference, and when the opportunity to help the Egyptian COE organize their agenda, I jumped at the chance. Why? Because I do believe the facility is going to play a key role in the future of EMC innovation.
Before I can explain further, it's worth re-stating what I believe are the three key pieces that enable Venn-diagram innovation: (a) understanding customer need, (b) leveraging existing expertise, and (c) discovering adjacent technologies. The intersection of these three activities can result in ideas for new products. Below is a graphic that I often cite describing an idea that resulted from customer data integrity expectations of RAID technology:
In this context, why is the COE in Egypt so intriguing? If you take a survey of the employee population at EMC's other locations (e.g. Russia, China, India, Israel, Ireland, etc), you will find that there is a strong R&D presence. In fact in every one of those countries I can name several employees that I have worked with on some sort of software development effort or another.
The Egypt COE, on the other hand, was launched with a 100% laser focus on EMC's current (and future) customer base. The engineers are currently field-based. The geographical spread of customers addressed by the COE is enormous. The facility is located at the intersection of Africa, Asia, and Europe (there are 115 countries on these three continents). The COE employees speak over half a dozen different languages, including the many different languages found all around the Mediterranean. The population in Cairo is extremely tech-savvy, with well over 36,000 IT-trained professionals (up from 500 just ten years ago!).
The wealth of customer feedback that this team will gather will be unrivaled, and as depicted above, the feedback is THE key ingredient for innovative product proposals.
So I am looking forward to planning the event together with my new Egyptian co-workers.
There's no doubt that it will be "smart fun", but the fun piece is simply a fringe benefit.
I hope the day itself will be the first of many "Egyptian briefings" on the problems that our worldwide customers would like us to solve.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
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