Jeff Nick, EMC senior vice president and chief technology officer

What started as a "science fair" approach to inspiring EMC Corp. employees to bring their innovative ideas forward has "taken off quite virally" across the company to become the focal point for a whole new virtual community, says Jeff Nick, EMC senior vice president and chief technology officer.

"It shows you the power of tapping into EMC's vast human intellectual capital," he told attendees at the second annual EMC Innovation Conference in Franklin, Massachusetts, in October 2008. Adding the ability for employees to participate remotely via Microsoft Live Meeting reflected the dramatic progress that's been made in linking EMC innovators across the globe. In addition to some 300 live conference-goers, Nick estimated that those tapping into the event virtually propelled attendance to more than 1,000.

Employee ideas drive the conference and influence development

For 2008, the call for Innovation Conference ideas drew 984 submissions from 19 countries. That's more than twice the number that pleasantly "overwhelmed" organizers in 2007.

A panel of 15 judges evaluated 30 finalist submissions on display at the conference to determine four 2008 winners. In addition, several hundred employees voted online for the Peoples' Choice selection.

"We were as impressed with the quality of submissions for 2008 as we were for 2007maybe even more so," Nick said. "The ideas are powerful."

The key concept behind the conference, which Nick and Mark Lewis, president of EMC's Content Management and Archiving Division, spearheaded in 2007, was "to give birth and shed light on" employee ideas that emerge outside the realm of top-directed strategies and tasks. "Employees who are thinking outside the box," Nick continued, "could influence the future direction EMC will take."

A powerful force for change

EMC has been incubating the winning ideas from 2007 and sharing them throughout the company. For example, EMC Resource Management will be incorporating the 2007 first-place winning idea into its next-generation resource management products. The idea of using Web 2.0 to collaborate also has given rise to communities of innovators across EMC who are working together to pursue ideas.

There were many good ideas to come out of the conferences beyond those chosen as winners. So the CTO Office has been striving to develop ways to "reach further down" and "further across" to cultivate and share such innovations across the company.

That effort began by using Web 2.0 to launch the Innovation Network and continues to grow. Although the CTO Office has been incubating the winning ideas, there is limited capacity to that approach. So Nick is reaching out to EMC's Centers of Excellence (COEs) around the globe to harness the intellectual capital, domain expertise, and locale of knowledge to drive EMC's research and innovation program.

With the help of IT, EMC is using social media to create communities around ideas that further advance collaborative innovation. Nick said that the use of EMC ONE, EMC's social media site, has "exploded"not just for sharing ideas on technology, but also for business, marketing, services, and customer support. Other tools for collaborating include the Innovation Network Lecture Series, through which a series of speakers share what they are working on with the rest of the technical and business community.

EMC also is reaching out to targeted customers to "socialize" new ideas so it can use their responses to direct research and tailor new products to meet their needs.

It's all part of the powerful force for change that was inspired by the Innovation Conference. Nick said, "We're tapping into the human current here at EMC."