Innovation in a Reinvented World: 10 Essential Elements to Succeed in the New World of Business

EMC: Chris Claudatos, Senior Director, EMC CTO Office Research & Development, and Shawn Douglass, Senior Director, Advanced Technology Ventures

Who would think that the first thing out of the mouths of two senior technical leaders would be a single word: serendipitous?

The catalyst for this serendipitous connection was Dr. Burt Kaliski in the CTO Office, who wanted to keep the momentum going following the company's annual Innovation Conference. Chris Claudatos, a senior director in the R&D group, arrived at the innovation best practices discussion ready to pitch his team's idea.

“We were looking at the mechanics of innovation. One of the challenges in a large company is coordinating the geographic distribution and multidisciplinary aspects of ideas—ideas that change over time—and e-mail is great but it isn't enough,” says Claudatos.

The missing piece was the discipline needed in gathering and storing the artifacts of these discussions—additional documents, source code, PowerPoint files, and spreadsheets—all in one place.

“EMC already has mainstream tools such as source control and EMC|ONE, which is public and open to all employees, but there may be things at the ideation stage that might not be ready for broad access by the employee base,” adds Claudatos. “We wanted greater control over the information and a tool that would provide all the elements of an innovation practice in one setting.”

What Chris didn't know was that Shawn Douglass's team had already built this solution.