In my last post I described the entry into Phase 4 of the Data Analytics Lifecycle. This phase is all about running analytic models against the high-quality data in an Analytic Sandbox. EMC Data Scientists are attempting to prove that knowledge transfer activity (e.g. idea submissions that are part of our global Innovation Showcase) can identify research-specific boundary spanners. The first clue that our hypothesis is correct can be found on the chart below.
As I stated in my last post, each color represents an innovator from a different country. The large dots with red circles around them represent "hubs". A hub represents a person with high connectivity and high betweeness. I chose this cluster because it contains geographic variety, which is critical to prove our hypothesis about geographic boundary spanners.
One person in this graph has a betweenness score of 578, which is "sky-high" when compared to the rest of the nodes in the graph.
The name of this person is Jidong Chen.
I was not surprised to hear his name.
Jidong has been a researcher in EMC's Office of the CTO for five years. In fact, I wrote a blog post about Jidong's research several years ago, in which he and his team proposed a vastly different approach to desktop search.
With Jidong's name in hand, I return to my original hypothesis #5 from Phase 1:
Hypothesis #5: Knowledge transfer facilitation via boundary spanners
There are certain employees that have arisen within a geography and made connections with other geographies for the purpose of collaboration. They may not have high visibility within a corporation aside from the direct connections that they have made on their own. I believe that not only can analytics identify these people, but analytics can also classify the type of knowledge that these individuals are transferring. These "boundary spanners" can be targeted and trained as "innovation facilitators" and united at a corporate level.
IH5: Knowledge transfer activity can identify research-specific boundary spanners in disparate regions.
Does betweenness indicate that Jidong is a boundary spanner? In order to further prove this hypothesis, I can simply run a query against Jidong's name within our Analytic Sandbox. This sandbox was described in a Phase 2 post, and is depicted below as a reminder.
What did the collection of entries in the sandbox tell me about Jidong's innovation and research activities?
- In 2011 Jidong attended the SIGMOD conference in Greece
- Jidong visited EMC employees in France that are part of the IIG business unit (e.g. Documentum)
- Jidong presented his thoughts on the SIGMOD conference at a Virtual Brownbag session attended by
- Three employees in Russia
- One employee in Cairo
- One employee in Ireland
- One employee in India
- Three employees in the U.S.
- One employee in Israel
- In 2012 Jidong attended the SDM 2012 Conference in California
- On the same trip he visited innovators and researchers at Greenplum and VMware
- Later on that trip he stood before the monthly CTO Council and introduced two of his researchers to dozens of EMC innovators and researchers
The bottom line is that (part of) our hypothesis is indeed correct. The data (and the model) have identified a boundary spanner. What is the nature of the knowledge that Jidong transfers as part of his boundary spanner activity? In other words, how can the model identify the "research-specific" aspects of the boundary spanner?
In order to answer this question, we will turn to a different Phase 4 modeling exercise, which willl be described in the next post.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
Director, EMC Innovation Network
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