In a previous post I described the formation of a global team that began gathering innovation data from EMC R&D teams around the world. This team decided to start by gathering activities that are commonly associated with innovation: e.g. university research engagements, publications, conference attendance, dialogues with customers, knowledge transfer sessions, idea contests, and intellectual property.
Data scientists within the company began to run their algorithms against this data and came up with interesting visualizations. This activity fulfilled the third tenet of a “Know Where You Are” strategy: visualize activity.
The team prototyped a live, dynamic university dashboard. This dashboard supports:
- Heat maps to show the location of each university
- Filters that highlight the universities that focus on certain research themes like cloud, big data, and trust
- Lists of professors from each universities
- Lists of EMC employees that are actively involved with each university
Many technology features (like RAID and deduplication, for example) came from the university community. Analytic tracking of the global university research community provides data on emerging technologies that could prove to be meaningful to EMC’s future technology portfolio. The diagram below highlights the ability of the tool to chart the locations of partner universities, along with search and measurement capabilities.
The prototype also created heat maps of global employee idea submissions year over year. After 8 years of idea submissions the tool has been able use topic modeling techniques to identify the rise and fall of different technology themes that our global employee base is seeing. For example, starting several years ago the tool identified an uptick in areas related to cloud, mobility, and big data. These ideas from several years ago were all pointing towards a new form of IT infrastructure which IDC refers to as the third platform.
The goal of these visualizations, ultimately, is to give EMC executives a window into innovation activity around the world and tie this activity to investment levels. The visualization below classifies the entire list of advanced development projects currently running within the company. In this example, each advanced development project has been bucketed into six different strategic IP categories. The red bars indicate the number of global innovators that are working in that strategic area. The blue line indicates the number of projects that those innovators are working on.
At the time of the creation of this chart, this was the first time that EMC was able to combine all the elements of the database together in the areas of communities, intellectual property, and research projects. The success of producing these visualizations was the last piece of the puzzle to facilitate investment decisions.
In an upcoming post I will dive into the governance process currently being used to guide innovation investment decisions.
Steve
EMC Fellow
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