A smart approach to innovation allows employees to communicate across a global system to pool and refine their good process ideas, writes Ian Campbell

IF TWO heads are better than one, then 47,000 people collectively sharing their thoughts must stand a very good chance of making something happen.

Many companies are focused on innovation to stay competitive but EMC is unusual in encouraging its entire global workforce to come up with ideas to benefit the wider business.

In 2007, the company set up its Innovation Network, where cross-company collaboration is encouraged at the desktop using social networking tools. Through e-mail, teleconferencing and document-sharing portals, people can step outside their day jobs to develop new ideas around existing processes and in line with EMC business goals.

“It’s about connecting talent through a technology platform regardless of geography and business units,” says Burt Kaliski, who runs the innovation programme. “It’s based on the notion that a company is greater than the sum of its individual parts.”

The programme makes innovation an everyday opportunity and has been successful in ways that would have been impossible in the days before web 2.0 technologies.

One idea that started life in a research arm in Beijing, for example, was picked up by an Israeli office and developed further in conjunction with a team in Bangalore, with regular contributions from an expert in California.

“Rather than create more research institutions, we wanted to tap into the intellectual capital that we possess across our global employees and create a neural network,” says Jeff Nick, EMC chief technology officer, who started the programme in 2007 with Kaliski.

“Process innovation can be the most catalytic in enabling innovation to occur throughout the company. It isn’t about a piece of technology, it’s about creating a Petri dish from which innovation can blossom.”

Tech companies are famous for their innovation strategies, from Apple creating islands of innovation that are separate from the main business, to Google and its policy of encouraging employees to use 20 per cent of their time in work pursuing independent projects.

EMC is different again and unashamedly focused on clear business goals. Participants in the programme are encouraged to pursue ideas in areas where EMC is active, so it’s no surprise that cloud computing is a favourite springboard for innovation.

“The company’s DNA is around applied research that can be leveraged for the creation of new products, not research for its own sake,” says Kaliski.

Because the approach cuts across organisational boundaries, it still manages to remain “true to the spirit of innovation”, according to Nick. “Product divisions have innovation pipelines that can be constrained by alignment to that division. With the innovation network, ideas can come from any part of the company and can be applied to any existing business unit or to a strategic initiative outside of any specific division.”

The recent 2010 EMC Innovation Conference was hosted at the company’s Cork facility, an annual showcase and prize-giving for the best ideas. Winners included a sustainable, low-cost data-storage system designed for developing nations and a new home entertainment storage solution.

It was a record-breaking year, with EMC employees from 26 countries submitting more than 1,500 proposals. Top ideas are funded and incubated before finding a place in EMC’s future product and services portfolio. One of the 2009 winners was Brendan Butler, who headed up a team at the Cork campus that led to the development of data centre monitoring tools.

The scheme provides compelling evidence of one-way social networking can be leveraged for corporate advantage, although Nick warns that the tools are useless if they are not supported by the right kind of infrastructure and leadership. “Social networking has to be used properly and you have to put a programme behind it. If you just leverage the technology and create a portal that people can access, it won’t yield much fruit. You have to steward the process and incentivise the community.”

He says 2010 has been an inflection year for a programme that was starting to reach critical mass. An initiative driven by the technology office has been embraced by all of the company, from the chief executive down, drawing committed support and award sponsorship from all of EMC’s product divisions.

The biggest obstacle to innovation is time to market but even here, EMC is racking up some success stories. Two years ago, a sophisticated concept for creating a mass storage cloud won an award at the conference. Products based on the technology are just about to be launched.

Suggestions that closely focused applied research leave little room for the disruptive innovation that is the lifeblood of the tech sector prompts Nick to put the programme in context. He is keen to stress that it is a separate entity to EMC’s ongoing investment in innovation. The company spends almost $2 billion (€1.48 billion) a year on traditional RD which has supported its evolution from a pure play storage supplier to an information infrastructure specialist.