EMC Shark Tank

 

I am a big fan of the television show, Shark Tank. In the hour long show 3-4 entrepreneurs pitch their idea’s t o a panel of very successful entrepreneurs willing to invest their time and money to make money in new ventures. At EMC I had to privilege of participating in our internal version of Innovation Shark Tank.

The EMC Office of the CTO sponsors a yearly Global Innovation Conference. The conference is the culmination of a yearlong process. The general program process is EMC “sponsors” document challenges they are interested in having solved. This year there were 28 challenges published company wide. These challenges may ask for idea’s on adding new features to existing products, new product idea’s, services that can by delivered internally or externally to improve customer experience. Wide ranges of challenges are presented to the entire company. Individuals or teams can create an innovation proposal that addresses one or more of the sponsor challenges. The proposals are reviewed by judges representing the challenge sponsor and three finalists are selected with the winner being announced at the company wide Global Innovation Conference. The winners receive a cash prize that can be used to further develop their proposal. They also receive incubation support from the owner of the challenge. 

This program has been running for the past six years and has grown in participation and prestige. I’ve heard many employees’ comment on the number of submissions they made, their status as a finalist, or comments on a submission they read about. Who wants to be in that conversation and not participated?

This year I had the honor to participate a judge for one of the challenges and will be part of the team announcing the winners next week in Shanghai, China. Being on the inside of this process I was very impressed with the:

• efficiency of the process
• quantity of the submissions
• quality of submissions

The process is automated through an internal EMC portal, which can be accessed here for those on the EMC network. From this portal the:

• Innovation challenges or problems are documented, submitted, and reviewed by EMC employee’s
• Solution proposals are created, and submitted. The proposals are linked up to three challenges
• judges review the submissions for their challenges and grade them independently. EMC employee’s can “Like” or “Dislike” submissions to provide anonymous feedback to the judges

Overall the portal makes it easy for employee’s to participate. This is what technology and automation should do.

Since the start of the program in 2007 you can see we have seen a 10x increase in the number of innovation submissions and over a 2x growth in the past two years.

 

 

 

Companies kill for this type of participation in any program and especially a program designed to spark innovation. The challenge this creates is in four-week period each of these 4,218 submissions has to be reviewed. Also consider a single submission could be applied against up to three challenges so the different judging teams really review a little over 10,000 idea’s. The portal made accessing, commenting, and scoring the idea’s easy but the time commitment and diligence was impressive.

The most important impression I had was the quality of the submissions, which only confirms my belief in the quality of EMC employee’s. This year their has been an increased focus on not just supporting the winning submissions but to also providing a mechanism for the submitters to get feedback on their submissions, mentorship to improve the proposal, and expose the appropriate proposals to our product development teams.

This year for the first time we will be publically announcing the 2013 challenge winners, and best in show winners, as well as an update on few past winning submissions at our Q3 earnings announcement on 10/22. This is a great way for us to recognize some great innovators.

This program is a great advantage for EMC. The participation, and quality of the proposals are outstanding and the technology to facilitate global participation is in place. I think we will continue to see this program spark great innovation at EMC. What do you think of our Innovation Program?

Comments

[Jay]

Very interesting - how could I find out more about the program?