Innovation Training

As I mentioned last year, ten of my current co-workers joined EMC in September as part of an accelerated leadership program. Several of us are mentoring them through the first twenty-seven months of their careers as they rotate between different jobs during that time.

In addition to their day-to-day job duties, they’ve been asked to propose a new product or direction for the company. This directive is the equivalent of “innovation training”. How do new employees generate new ideas while building new, relevant and impactful prototypes?

Their approach has been two-fold:

1. Get your day job done.
2. Take initiative beyond your day job.

The second step (taking initiative) is what separates innovators from the rest of the pack.

In my experience, there are three key initiatives:

1. Take the initiative to become an expert in something (this may actually overlap with your day job).
2. Take the initiative to understand customer problems, needs, and requirements.
3. Take the initiative to learn adjacent technologies.

These three initiatives are summed up in this diagram:

Seven months later, I’m seeing an increase in innovative activity for their project, all visible on EMC’s internal social media site (EMC ONE). Their activity is focused on the field of digital preservation. What initiative have they taken in these three areas?

1. They’ve deepened their knowledge of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard. This specification is fairly dense. They’ve all read it, they’ve all “adopted” a section of it, and they’ve all presented their section (internally, and to customers).
2. They’ve connected with customers in two different ways. They’ve had conversations with EMC Sales and asked what pain points customers are describing while trying to build digital archives. They’ve also visited the JFK Library and quizzed the archivists about the pros and cons of their current solution.
3. They’ve begun to explore, read, download, build, run and otherwise investigate relevant adjacent technologies, some of them “open” (Fedora Commons, XAM, CASPER, RODA), some of them proprietary (Atmos, Centera, GreenPlum, xCP).

They’ve also interacted with a set of students at EMC Research Russia. These students are exploring digital preservation using XDB and XAM. 

Where is it all going to lead?  There are a lot of possibilities at this point.  When these three steps are followed in earnest, solid ideas are usually generated.

Steve

Information Playground

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur