Recently I gave a keynote speech at NCTA, the North Carolina Technology Association. I was asked to start the conference by answering one question:
How do market leaders sustain innovation?
As I prepared for this speech I began to consider the historical methods of innovation at EMC:
- During the 80s and 90s there was a surge of creativity, ideation and delivery that led to the launch of the disk array industry. Technologies such as RAID, mirrored caching, snap copy, replication, storage area networks, network attached storage, etc., were all organically conceived and delivered. The industry acceptance and adoption of these technologies was so pronounced that EMC was invited to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange at the end of the 1990s. I attribute this rise to market leadership, in part, to a combination of creativity and delivery.
- At the turn of the new millennium the high-tech industry as a whole experienced a downturn, but by 2010 EMC was still viewed as a market leader. Much of the credit had to do with the fact that EMC innovated via acquisition. EMC morphed from primarily being a storage company to also being a middleware and application company. The ability of its engineers to organically create and deliver was augmented by the successful acquisition of a variety of technologies such as VMware, FilePool, RSA, Documentum, Legato, Isilon, DataDomain, and dozens more. These companies, in turn, practiced creativity and delivery.
After beginning my speech with a historical look back, I moved forward by commenting that EMC continues to practice historical innovation strategies: e.g. creativity, delivery, acquisition. However, the company has also added a significantly new approach. I introduced this approach by asking the audience three questions:
One of the side effects of acquisition is that each organization comes with its own methodology and approach to innovation. This works well immediately after an acquisition. But over time, the corporation can lose its line of sight into the actual number of people and dollars dedicated to innovation across the company. More importantly, it can also have no hard data describing how those resources are being applied across disparate product lines.
It is for this reason that EMC’s CTO (John Roese) has introduced the Know Where You Are innovation strategy during the current decade. Roese goes so far as to say that without answers to these questions you are wasting your time on innovation.
In upcoming posts I will focus on the new approach being used to generate future products, services, and revenue at EMC.
Steve
EMC Fellow
Comments