GUEST POST from Steve Todd

This year I’ve come across several thought-provoking posts regarding managing remote innovation. I’ve also written several blog posts about a new role I assumed in 2012: managing EMC Labs China.

There are two articles in particular that have been helpful:

• A CEO’s guide to innovation in China (McKinsey)
• Six Traits You Need to Manage Remote Teams Successfully (Mark Murphy)

I like these two articles because one offers corporate advice (McKinsey) and one offers individual advice (Murphy). In order to accelerate EMC Labs China innovation I am trying to draw the best out of these articles and push for change on both fronts.

Individually

The Murphy article taught me, first and foremost, to take care of my energy level. The twelve hour time difference leaves you tired. My co-workers in China need to see me as energetic. Murphy calls this indefatigable.

In addition, the Murphy article validated two behaviors that I was already practicing: (a) company evangelist, and (b) enthusiastic.

In regards to being a company evangelist, the team in China is well aware that I blog frequently on the capabilities of the EMC product line. The public evangelism evident on my blog naturally translates to internal evangelism to the team.

When it comes to generating enthusiasm, the team is also aware that I consider myself lucky. When I was developing products as part of an EMC business unit, I always had two or three innovation projects on the back burner. Usually they were pretty cool.  With the EMC Labs China team I’ve got a dozen projects on the front burner. We work on next generation product possibilities that span nearly all of our business units. It’s a playground for innovation. Being enthusiastic in this environment, for me, is easy.

Murphy’s article stresses that when these characteristics (along with several others) are evident in a remote manager, success often follows.

Corporately

The McKinsey article highlights some very real threats to multinational innovation in China that I cannot solve as an individual. I can work, however, with EMC’s Executive team on making changes to management frameworks and philosophies. Here are some of the key points raised by McKinsey:

• Multinationals often have a hard time building an innovation team in China due to attrition. The following quote advises multinationals to follow the lead of local Chinese companies: “Chinese companies, for example, excel at creating a community-like environment to build loyalty to the institution. That helps keep some employees in place when competing offers arise, but it may not always be enough“.

• Career paths and company brand matter. The brand of a successful multinational can be an important retention strategy: “Talented Chinese employees increasingly recognize the benefits of being associated with a well-known foreign brand and like the mentorship and training that foreign companies can provide. So multinationals that commit themselves to developing meaningful career paths for Chinese employees should have a chance in the growing fight with their Chinese competitors for R&D talent“.

• Multinationals with successful innovation collaboration frameworks have an advantage: “One area where multinationals currently have an edge is promoting collaboration and the internal collision of ideas, which can yield surprising new insights and business opportunities. In many Chinese companies, traditional organizational and cultural barriers
  inhibit such exchanges.”

This last point is an area where EMC is having a high degree of success. My co-workers at EMC Labs China are the most active global contributors to our yearly idea contest (EMC’s Innovation Showcase). Out of just under thirty winning ideas selected during this year’s Showcase, the EMC Labs China team was selected as the winner of more than twenty percent of them!  This means that out of 2200 ideas, global judges chose five EMC Labs China ideas as the best in the world, with several members contributing to a cross-cultural idea voted as “Best in Show”. It is incumbent on me to continue to strengthen this program. Indeed, our 7th Innovation Conference will be held in China next year (the sixth was held in Israel).

My biggest action item, however, is a combination of individual and corporate.

I’m flying over to China next week, and one of my tasks is to begin a mentoring relationship with a key senior contributor in China that has been a strong innovator for at least five years. Given the importance of career paths in China, interaction with EMC Fellows (such as myself) and Distinguished Engineers is highly prized.  I also have an action item to work with Human Resources on the establishment of a global corporate Fellow and Distinguished Engineer mentoring program. This community (over 80 people) can help scale the experience for not only China but other nations as well.

If you are interested in this topic, I recommend that you give both articles a thorough read. I’d also appreciate additional comments from readers who can recommend alternative approaches.

image credit:  mckinseyquarterly.com, imagine china/corbis

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

Recently I published a post describing the enormous amount of data being contributed to the Digital Universe by machines.

Billions of devices will generate petabytes of information. Much of it will land in deep archives that are eventually mined and analyzed using a variety of fast, parallel analytic techniques.

The Digital Universe study posits that by 2020 these machines will not only generate an estimated 40% of all digital content, but the machines will be expecting an immediate (sub-second) response, or instruction,  to determine the next robot-like action that they should take.  Often times these instructions will need to rely on a variety of other sensor feeds and/or real-time streaming information.

The analytic techniques of 2012 will quite frankly not cut it. What kind of innovation will be required to support this growing reality?

It’s an interesting thought exercise to examine some of the emerging technologies in analytics and consider how they can be combined to achieve near-instantaneous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and decision making.

In this post I’ll approach the discussion from the angle of a centralized model. I’m assuming, in the short term, that service providers will begin adding these technologies into the plumbing of their existing data centers.

Over time, however, as the device count scales you will likely see these implementations move to the edge in a dispersed cloud model.

Consider the graphic below and the bi-directional M2M needs of devices connected to the cloud infrastructure of the future:

Here are two emerging technologies that will facilitate M2M in coming cloud infrastructures:

1. More and more streaming data will be ingested into in-memory, distributed data grids. A good example is VMware GemFire: “an in memory data grid that enables real-time data distribution data replication, caching and data management using a non-relational key-value store, to allow storage of data for client applications.” In addition, VMware SQLFire is described as folows: “VMware vFabric SQLFire is memory-oriented data management software delivering application data at runtime with horizontal scale and lightning-fast performance while providing developers with the well-known SQL interface and tools“.

The key is the in-memory, horizontal scale provided by these types of technologies. Business logic accepts streaming machine input from sensors and immediately stores them in either key-value (Gemfire) or SQL (SQLFire) format. If a given sensor requires immediate feedback based on the state of other sensors, it can be quickly retrieved via an in-memory query. This approach, depicted below, enables the “sub-second” response times that many sensors will be expecting.

2.  More and more streaming machine data will be process in real-time by a technology known as CEP, Complex Event Processing. Wikipedia has a good summary of the technology:

Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. Complex event processing, or CEP, is event processing that combines data from multiple sources to infer events or patterns that suggest more complicated circumstances. The goal of complex event processing is to identify meaningful events (such as opportunities or threats) and respond to them as quickly as possible.

These events may be happening across the various layers of an organization as sales leads, orders or customer service calls. Or, they may be news items, text messages, social media posts, stock market feeds, traffic reports, weather reports, or other kinds of data. An event may also be defined as a “change of state,” when a measurement exceeds a predefined threshold of time, temperature, or other value.

Two implementations of CEP getting a lot of buzz are Esper and Storm (Thomas Dudziak has written a good blog

Both of these technologies will become more common in the clouds of the future. Exactly how they fit into a cloud architecture is an area being explored by corporations and academia alike. In a future post I will discuss a research initiative that is starting to investigate analytics of streams at scale.

image credit: e-forex.net; stevetodd.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

I continue to lead a Data Science project at EMC that focuses on Innovation Analytics. My approach has been to create a set of hypotheses and leverage a task force of volunteer data scientists to help me prove or disprove them.

During this process I ran into a roadblock on one hypothesis:

Hypothesis #7 Incubation Lineage and
Asset Generation

I believe that the path that knowledge takes, from a local innovator, to a corporate boundary spanner, to an implementation team, to a delivered asset, can be traced and measured. I also believe that this measurement, once studied, can reveal ways to accelerate innovation and point out areas of knowledge that are yet to be converted. I’ve long been a fan of provenance, and I love the concept of “idea lineage”. The lineage can be studied to reduce asset delivery time.

IH7a: Frequent knowledge expansion and transfer events reduce
the amount of time it takes to generate a corporate asset from an idea.

IH7b: Lineage maps can reveal when knowledge expansion and
transfer did not (or has not) result(ed) in a corporate asset.

The roadblock occurred because my data sets did not contain sufficient data to measure “elapsed time” between events. My mentor in this initiative, David Dietrich, suggested that I begin a longitudinal study. In a previous blog post this year I described his advice as follows:

Our ability to prove hypothesis #7 was in jeopardy. This realization was
not the end of the world. In data scientist terms, it was time to begin a longitudinal study (making a series of observations over a long
period of time).The team began to design a method whereby TRL (Technology
Readiness) levels would be gathered and recorded as a regular part of the
reporting and gathering of global innovation activities. Over time, we would
eventually have enough data to take a good, hard look at our hypothesis

After writing the blog post I commissioned the longitudinal study by collaborating with EMC Labs China researcher Diego Wu. Diego and I added two steps to our data gathering process:

1. We introduced innovation lineage threads
   whenever new, significant research initiatives started (e.g. a university research
   collaboration was funded).
2. We gathered innovation activities in the same
   way, but added these activities to a lineage thread when appropriate.

Diego implemented this framework, and two key insights emerged.

Asset Generation (or lack thereof) is Measurable

The diagram below is an actual record of an interaction that EMC had with the University of Florida. An innovation lineage thread was created (the U Florida lineage thread). As multiple innovation events were entered into the innovation analytics framework, they were also associated with the U Florida thread.

In this example, several assets emerged from the initial visit of a professor to EMC’s campus. These assets include the publication of a paper (good press for EMC), the hiring of a student (who was already up to speed on the EMC domain to which they were assigned), and the introduction of a new software feature into an existing product line.  Each event occurred at a discrete point in time that is a measurable distance away from any other event in the lineage thread. In this case, three assets were generated within a six month period. The time lapse becomes a data point that can be compared with other lineage threads to evaluate the “time it takes to generate an asset from an idea” (the
original hypothesis).

Not all ideas experience this level of success. Often times no significant corporate asset is produced. The use of innovation lineage threads allows us to calculate “asset generation success ratios” across all ideas registered in the system. Success can be correlated against many different factors, including geography, the people associated with the idea,
the business unit they are part of, amount of investment, etc.

“Engaging” Insights

While studying any given lineage thread the level of engagement becomes obvious. For example, with the University of Florida I could see clear examples of employee and faculty engagement. They visited each other. They worked on a paper together. They attended a conference together. I could “count” the number of such entries in the database and calculate such metrics as “average number of engagements per month”.

This enables me to draw “heat maps” by asking, for example, which universities are sufficiently “engaged” (or which are not).

As the Director of Global Innovation I struggle to keep track of the health of global innovation initiatives at EMC. For example:

• EMC has dozens of university research partners around the world.  How engaged are we with each one?
• EMC has committed to incubate nearly 30 winning ideas from the 2012 Innovation Showcase process. Which ones are still alive?
  Which ones have stalled? What kind of corporate assets result from EMC’s yearly investment in the Showcase?
• How can we fail fast? Which funded innovation initiatives are not likely to succeed and should experience “de-investment”?

The decision to begin a longitudinal study was the right one. I’m also convinced that using the Data Analytics Lifecycle (shown below, and taught in EMC’s Data Scientist Course) was the right idea. The project will most certainly progress to Step 6, causing the EMC Executive team to make operational changes to our innovation frameworks.

If you have experience with a concept similar to innovation lineage threads, I’d be interested to hear more about your approach.

See related articles here.

image credit: stevetodd.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

A machination is defined as a crafty scheme, a plot, or intrigue.

When I look at the wealth of information provided by the IDC in this year’s Digital Universe Study, I can’t help but think that machines are writing a pretty crafty plot in which we as humans are designing a fairly sophisticated communication network for them.

IDC is nearly at the midpoint of their Digital Universe Study.  They define the Digital Universe as “a measure of all the digital data created, replicated, and consumed in a
single year”. The first study was completed in 2007. This initial study predicted that the Digital Universe in 2010 would grow to 988 exabytes.

They were off by nearly thirty percent (the Digital Universe in 2010 was estimated by IDC to be 1277 exabytes).

Each year the IDC introduces more sophisticated insights, and this year is no exception. The intrigue surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine To Machine (M2M) is a major subplot in the report.

Digital machines were estimated to produce 11% of the Digital Universe in 2005. These machines represent a “fourth wave” of digital producers. These waves are typically described as follows:

1. Computers, digital by nature, began to populate the Digital Universe.
2. Telephones transformed from analog to digital, resulting in universal expansion.
3. Cameras and media began contributing massive amounts of additional digital content.
4. Embedded systems (e.g. sensors, surveillance cameras, smart meters, appliances, medical devices, toys, etc) are becoming one of “the major sources for ones and zeros”.

The IDC estimates that by 2020 machines will be generating 40% of the Digital Universe.

What technology shifts allowed machines to become protagonists in the drama of the digital universe?

I picked up additional insight on this question from a recent issue of The Economist. Three technology trends are enabling machines to become more prevalent:

• The new version of
  the internet protocol (IPV6), with an address space of 128 bits, provides for 340
  billion, billion, billion, billion unique addresses.  The current
  protocol, 32 bits long, supported only 4.3 billion binary addresses.
• There has never been
  enough bandwidth to support wireless M2M data streams.  Over the past
  year, new 4G networks have rolled out to accommodate smart phones and pads.
• Cloud computing has collapsed the unit cost of storage.

While the IDC study does not specifically cover IPV6 and 4G networks, it does provide an interesting graphic on the plumetting cost of storage:

The IDC estimates that the investment (per gigabyte) in storing the bits in the digital universe will drop from $2.00 in 2012 to $0.20 in 2020.

In 2020 the IDC also estimates that 200 billion “things” will be emitting digital bits, and much of this traffic will be broadcast in the hopes that other machines will return the favor via “sub-second” response times.

If billions of machines have any hope of responding to each other that quickly, we as humans are going to have to introduce new analytics paradigms in the cloud. In my next post I will highlight several technologies that can enable this emerging requirement.

Related article, Rise of the Machine-to-Machine Opportunities, courtesy of Forbes.com
image credit: emc.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

I’ve written several articles about the difference between entrepreneurial behavior and intrapreneurial behavior (innovating inside a large corporation).

Several months ago my team and I were intrigued to get an invitation for a series of interviews with the Business Innovation Factory. The interviews, which feature innovation insights from EMC employees and a number of other individuals and organizations, are being published in partnership with the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab. The lab is an “experimental platform to transform the face of entrepreneurship in the United States”.

The lab recognizes that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, and has a special section dedicated to corporate entrepreneurship known as Entrepreneurs Inside. Christine Costello of the Business Innovation Factory explains:

Elements of the Entrepreneurs Inside Experience is the second volume of work in the Lab. On the site, visitors will find insights gleaned from those thinking and acting entrepreneurially inside an organization. Their insights are grouped into nine fundamental elements of the entrepreneur experience and a library of video stories.

Babson and BIF are particularly excited about this release. With it, we hope to dispel many of the myths about entrepreneurship that prevent the many, not the few, from practicing it. As entrepreneurs inside—those thinking and acting
entrepreneurially within organizations—these stories and experiences are pivotal
to inspiring a new narrative around what entrepreneurship is and can be.

The release of Elements of the Entrepreneurs Inside Experience is just
the beginning. We are now working to identify and establish real-world
environments where we develop and test new ideas, programs and services designed to support you and others like you within organizations.

All of the videos are insightful. Of particular interest to me were two videos: EMC Innovation Showcase organizer Calvin Smith talking about the resistance that is often encountered in corporate innovation, and EMC Innovation Conference organizer Mary Henderson joining Calvin to talk about getting corporate investments for internal programs.

In the wake of last week’s 6th annual Innovation Conference, it’s encouraging to see a new resource emerge within driving distance of EMC Corporate headquarters (Babson is located in Massachusetts, and the Business Innovation Factory in Rhode Island).

For other companies interested in joining the lab, it’s easy to receive updates. Simply email Eli Stefanski or Christine Costello.

image credit: businessinnovationfactory.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

Today EMC is celebrating its sixth annual Innovation Conference at our Center of Excellence in Herzliya, Israel. The main stage of EMC’s Innovation Conference moves from country to country each year, and in 2012 the employees at EMC Israel have gone all-out with a multi-floor Innovation Market extravaganza.

One of the key elements of a global reverse innovation strategy is to expand knowledge in local markets. EMC employees in Israel accomplish this by creating partnerships with (a) local universities, (b) local government programs, (c) local corporations and businesses, and (d) local startups. These elements are combined with local relationships to customers and partners.

For today’s conference, the hallways are filled with dozens of local partners in an “Innovative Windows Decoration Contest”. The floor plan below shows the extent to which Israel’s local partners have participated in the contest:

Each partner has worked with EMC Design Services to create an eight foot high poster advertising their idea. They stand alongside their poster with their “product” and mingle with EMC employees (who are devoting their entire day to participate in the festivities). At the end of the contest, each employee fills out the form below in order to vote for their favorite idea.

As the Director of University R&D partnerships worldwide, I was happy to make connections today with our university partners in Israel (the Israel COE has at least a half dozen cutting-edge research partnerships between local faculty and EMC employees).

I was also impressed with GM Israel‘s driving simulator on the seventh floor of the building. GM uses this simulator to experiment with advanced user interfaces inside cars (e.g. voice recognition systems). The simulator observes the behavior of the drivers as they interact with potentially new interfaces. One of our EMC employees took the system for a test drive:

What was my favorite idea? That’s tough to say. Before my trip to Israel I dropped my dog off at a local kennel. I’ve been concerned about how he is doing as Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast. I would have felt a lot better if I knew that he was comfortably watching DogTV on his own monitor:

The day was incredibly well-planned in Israel, and part of a world-wide effort to coordinate similar events at our global locations. The Innovation Market concept will also be rolled out in corporate headquarters (176 South Street in Hopkinton) on November 1st. The global celebrations are marked by streaming videos from the main stage, and united by the announcements of the 28 winning ideas from EMC’s 2012 Innovation Showcase. All winners will not only receive a cash award, but the 28 sponsoring organizations have offered to incubate the winning ideas in 2013.

The map below shows the location of global conferences, as well as the locations of idea submitters around the world this year.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the day was the announcement of the formation of EMC Labs Israel. Israel becomes the second location for the EMC Labs brand (I have written often about the innovative work occuring at EMC Labs China). Dr. Orna Berry, EMC Vice President and General Manager of the Israel COE, made the announcement to a packed house in Herzliya:

In 2011 I wrote a retrospective of how the annual Innovation Conference changed my career.

Based on my experiences today, the Innovation Conference continues in its capacity to change EMC employee careers around the globe.

image credits: emc.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

I’ve been blogging my way through my experiences managing a team of researchers at EMC Labs China. Some of the key activities that this team participates in are local “high-tech” interactions with universities, conferences, corporations, etc. This is a good thing; the main mantra of reverse innovation is for local innovators to discover and solve local problems.

I, on the other hand, am at a bit of a disadvantage in coming up to speed on many of these relationships.

In a fortuitous turn of events, I had the opportunity to meet a group of people in Beijing who have a mission to help Americans establish local business relationships in China: USITO (United States Information Technology Office) and AmCham (American Chamber of Commerce) China. The picture below was taken during my talk about global innovation at a recent USITO/AmCham event.

My contact for the USITO session was Matt Roberts, who pointed me towards a description of the USITO charter:

The United States Information Technology Office (USITO) is an independent, non-profit, membership-based trade association, representing the U.S. information communication technologies (ICT) industry in China.

…..

USITO serves to create effective channels for engagement between our members and the Chinese & U.S. governments, academia and other industry groups focused on improving policy and regulation.

AmCham China also has a mission which essentially is to function as “a non-profit organization which represents US companies and individuals doing business in China“.

Both organizations can benefit me in my attempt to be involved in the Chinese innovation system in the following ways:

1. Periodic email exchanges with these organizations allow me to ask “what’s going on?”
2. USITO/AmChan can line up relevant meetings for me when I visit

Matt informed me of some innovation activities going on in my own country.  He let me about an international innovation study conducted by the National Academies (I was previously unaware of this initiative). I studied some of the material he sent me, which brought me up to speed on previous conversations about (a) indigenous innovation practices in China and (b) discussions about innovation frameworks between the U.S. and Chinese governments.

When establishing a global innovation framework for my (or any) corporation, locating and leveraging these points of contacts is a key strategy for success.

image credit: emc.com; innovationplayground.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

I’ve started writing a series of blog posts about my experiences managing innovation and research activities at EMC Labs China.

Let’s call this “Task X”.

I’ve also been running some serious experiments in Innovation Analytics this year. These experiments highlight “clusters of innovators” around EMC. One of the biggest clusters was Chinese, and a large majority of those within the cluster were from EMC Labs China (they are quite active in EMC innovation activities).

Let’s call this “Data Y”.

I began to wonder: can “Data Y” help me do “Task X”? Can analytics about the people I work with result in an altered management approach?  I would think so. After all, one of the key steps in the Data Analytics Lifecycle is to operationalizethe results of the analytics.

I asked EMC Distinguished Engineer John Cardente to revisit the Who Are These People analysis and drill down more deeply into the China cluster. John handed me the chart below containing a set of names with interesting centrality and betweenness characteristics:

The red colors were generated by John as part of a unique algorithm combining centrality, degree, and number of idea submissions.  At first glance, Dong Xiang, for example, appears to be a central figure with a large number of nodes clustered around him.  Ziye Yang has less nodes clustered around him yet his betweenness score is extremely high (this is visually evident by his connection to a sub-graph that is not directly accessible by other members such as Dong).

Can I leverage this data as part of innovation management? I have a theory, or perhaps we can call it a hypothesis:

• Those with high degree (# connections) can be leveraged to influence what gets done.
• Those with high centrality (betweenness) can be leveraged to socialize new, compelling ideas.

I know that I am not standing on solid ground with this hypothesis. The data is a bit “small” (it is only relevant to the submission of ideas from our Innovation Showcase). A larger sample size could result in completely different visualizations. But a quick “reality check” during my visit to China allowed me to meet the team and confirm skillsets and observe interactions at a local and international level.

The bottom line is that the visualization presented by John has got me thinking differently.

And interestingly enough, I’m acting differently, too.

Last week I invited Ziye to corporate headquarters to share some compelling new ideas emerging from EMC Labs China. Sure enough, this visit has resulted in a set of potentially new stakeholders and new projects.

My task now is to assess the business value of these new ideas and determine if the idea maps onto the skillsets of the team in China.

image credit: emc.com; innovationplayground.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

Much has been written about management of remote development teams that are building a product under the direction of a peer team located at corporate headquarters.

With the shift towards reverse innovation, global teams of innovators and researchers (located far away from corporate headquarters) function with greater automony. There is very little written about  management of these types of teams.

This is the situation I find myself in (as I introduced in a recent post). My role as Director of EMC’s global Innovation Network was recently augmented to include matrix responsibility for a research team in China. It is worthwhile to write down my impressions as I go through this new experience. This scenario will become more and more common (if there are readers out there who can refer me to resources in this area, please comment).

How did EMC arrive to have a research team in China? Like many high-tech companies, EMC opened an R&D center in China to take advantage of not only lower labor costs for engineers but also the growing high-tech market in Asia. We found that the competition to enter prestigious computer science programs in China was so fierce that the caliber of technologist being produced was extremely high. The Office of the CTO at EMC recognized that talented developers could also be applied towards research and advanced development without being tied to a particular business unit or product line.

So in 2007 a team was created. I had immediate interaction with this team in both 2008 and 2009. Two of my ideas from EMC’s Innovation Showcase contest were adopted and incubated by this team (see the picture of myself and technologists Roby Chen and Jake Li at the end of this post). Over the years their knowledge of EMC and VMware’s product line grew, and their engagements and publications at top tier conferences grew as well.

So how can I add value as a matrix manager located 12 hours away?  As I pointed out in my last post, I decided to conduct the NMAP process in cooperation with Human Resources, I gathered the results, and set off to China in person. What I learned through the whole process (and what has become my approach) can be summarized as follows:

The EMC Labs China employees all want to tackle problems that both (a) advance their career goals and (b) provide maximum value to EMC.

On my last day in China I chatted with China CTO Wei Liu and asked him how I can best help. He essentially echoed what I had learned:

“Map the best work that you can find to the right people on the team”.

I found this surprising, because it essentially means that I have to become quite familiar with everybody on the team, understand their skillsets, and have a good feel for the direction in which they would like their career to go. This is a significant amount of work.

In parallel, I need to use my connections around the globe (both internal and external) to start finding significant technology challenges that map onto the individual skillsets. I need to locate the stakeholders that want these problems solved (e.g. internal business units, external customers) and introduce them into all phases of the research life cycle. This is no small task either!

Fortunately I have a perfect use case to get me started. I have a challenge of my own: accelerate innovation around the globe, spark the creation of the next generation of high-tech offerings that will propel EMC into its future.

During my trip I found several EMC Labs China developers with an expertise in database technologies (Greenplum) as well as analytics (Topic Modeling, Natural Language processing). I talked to them about their careers. They want their contributions to bring value to EMC, and they want their expertise to be more highly recognized within the corporation as a whole.

I decided to simply leverage their autonomy by giving them a challenge, walking away, and re-engaging with them after a few weeks. Here is the challenge I gave them:

Which areas of knowledge are growing the fastest at which Center of Excellence?

In other words: what is Russia good at? Cairo? China? Israel? Ireland? India? Brazil? USA? I’ve been wondering if we can programatically answer these questions as part of the hypotheses that I’ve been writing about recently (look at Hypothesis #4).

What were the results? Is this way of “remote innovation management” appropriate and effective?

More to come in future posts.

2008 Photo of Roby Chen, Steve Todd, Jake Li at EMC's Innovation Conference

image credit: wantchinatimes.com; innovationplayground.com

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GUEST POST from Steve Todd

I have been writing about my new experience managing a research team in China. The well-trodden rules of engagement for “glocalization” don’t apply in a reverse innovation environment. I’ve been feeling my way around my new role, looking for an approach to use as my baseline. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Get to know each member of the research team and launch new initiatives that (a) map onto their skillsets and career goals, and (b) deliver value back to the corporation.

I visited China and began to meet (and understand) the team. In particular, I met several people with great strength in analytics and data mining, and I spoke to them about a hypothesis that, if proven, would provide great value to EMC. This hypothesis asserts that the analysis of global research and innovation activities (in the form of emails, documents, presentations,etc) would yield insight into the specific growth of EMC knowledge in different areas of the world.

They were engaged. Two of them (Tao and Baoyao) set off on parallel paths to prove the hypothesis. Tao focused on Topic Modeling, Baoyao focused on a Natural Language Processing variant. Research teams are meant to be autonomous. With the help of several university interns, the EMC Labs China team dove into the work, and I returned to the U.S.

Several weeks later, they shared preliminary results. The chart below shows topic comparisons between the research activities of two different countries (China and Russia). As part of Tao’s research he generated the following chart:

This chart profiles two countries (China = 0, Russia = 1), bucketizes the topics into ten categories, and then analyzes the distribution of documents into those categories. In certain areas it is clear that Russia has more focus than China, and vice versa. I won’t dive into all of the details here, but there are some areas where Russia has demonstrably more focus (e.g. compression algorithms) while China clearly has more involvement in others (e.g. Hadoop improvements).

Baoyao, as part of his NLP investigations, created the word cloud below which yields further insights into innovation and research activities within Russia:

I was very pleased with the both the accuracy of the results and the insight I gained from their efforts. I hope to spend more time in future posts elaborating on some of the difficulties, successes, and lessons learned for this particular use case. The point of this post, however, is about the overall approach to managing global innovation.

The team essentially validated my hypothesis. They were able to use their considerable skills in solving a significant problem. The stakeholder in this effort (me) gained great insight. It is valuable. Their efforts resulted in visibility inside and (as of this blog post!) outside of EMC.

The model of mapping valuable business problems to global skillsets and career goals worked in this case. Future posts will explore other insights that I am gaining during this process.

image credit: ecvv.com

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