Corporate Explorer

4Ideation: Generating Ideas for New Ventures

In 2016, inspired by Vince Roche's ambition to take the firm “Beyond Silicon,” Analog Devices launched an effort to explore the hunting zone of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT connects machines and appliances to the Internet so that data on how they are functioning can be analyzed to generate insights to improve performance. This could be as simple as a refrigerator that sends your shopping list direct to the grocery store when it senses when you are running low on food or as sophisticated as a device that tells you when a jet engine needs servicing to prevent it breaking down unexpectedly. Analog Devices component technologies were already embedded in many of these solutions. The opportunity was to look beyond the silicon semiconductor and add new services enabled by cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

The IoT initiative formed eight sprint teams to explore different end-markets, such as consumer products and healthcare. These teams operated on a series of 30-day sprints, a term borrowed from agile software development, to develop proposals for the company to invest in. Kevin Carlin, then a general manager for Analog's Industrial Automation business, was invited to lead one of these teams focused on industrial machines. Carlin saw the sprint team as an opportunity to move the company into an entirely new marketspace. Major manufacturers of industrial machines were starting to design IoT functionality into their future ...