Jeff Nick, senior vice president and chief technology officer of EMC, said: "Global collaboration will make the traditional R&D model a thing of the past, and it will certainly promote the R&D process of EMC faster."
The laboratory is open, which means that trade secrets and intellectual property rights may be leaked. EMC, a grenade thrown into the traditional control concept, immediately triggered the explosion of the industry's thinking concept.
Control failed.
One of the characteristics of the traditional laboratory model is to do basic research independently, even independently of the product group within the company.
"This model has made great contributions," said Fan Chenggong, vice president of EMC and general manager of China R&D Center. "But today's era is developing. For example, PARC is a famous laboratory, which invented the graphical interface and mouse, but it did not bring great profits to the company. "
Fan Chenggong believes that Research2.0 will become the next generation of research methods, which also shows EMC's prediction for the future.
Is the future closely related to the open concept of the Internet? Is the business world really undergoing some fundamental changes?
Let's take a look at what happened in the internet field. In fact, most Internet products have set an example in brainstorming. For example, MSN robot is an unexpected harvest of MSN's open API (Application Programming Interface). Skype has the function of interacting with Outlook, which invigorates Skype's social network through Outlook. What's more, the Internet community has reached a * * * understanding: user group behavior, mutual contact and talents can continuously improve company services, such as MySpace and Yi Bei, and every time users visit them, it is equivalent to redesign.
"The Internet is a brand-new way of life organization." This article, which is widely circulated in the whole IT field, said, "We have realized that the business model of controlling consumers and content has failed. It is foolish to oppose the Internet, because what you oppose is people's originality and innovative spirit. "
More importantly, according to Fan Chenggong, EMC chose to invest in an open R&D community as a way to enter a "mirror country", where the laboratory is closely integrated with the product R&D department within the company (all EMC product groups are represented on the network), so that the results obtained through the network can quickly find the most favorable products; On the other hand, through the information exchange mode provided by 2.0, we seek global cooperation and make R&D reach a new height.
In EMC's vision, through such a broad network concept (including online internet and offline interpersonal network), "mirror country" will present a perfect face-EMC will benefit from basic research, products and customers, and innovation will be quickly transformed into output value.
Open to competitors
However, EMC's innovation network is not open to all users, but "basically limited to professionals".
If the concept of nodes in Manuel Caster's book is quoted-nodes are the places with the densest information and the information between nodes is smooth-then the three most important nodes of EMC's innovation network are the R&D centers of two enterprises in the United States and China and the R&D departments of more than 30 companies acquired in the past.
In addition, those relatively loose nodes also include almost all peers in the industry-social research institutions, university groups, customers and even global competitors. "We will push many projects, and many will not stipulate what content must be developed." Fan Chenggong said.
This is the difference between EMC Innovation Network and IBM's "Global Integrated Enterprise" project, which is more open to internal and global customers. This is also the difference between EMC Innovation Network and other companies that set up laboratories in universities, such as Intel, whose projects are relatively clear, and EMC has to implement a policy of blurring the boundaries between "content publishers" and "content recipients" from the beginning.
The boundary between "listener" and "speaker" is blurred, so will excessive listening cause confusion?
"Indeed, we seem to be blurring the distinction between master and slave. It looks chaotic, but there must be order in chaos." Fan Chenggong reminded us not to ignore the wisdom of the masses and the power of waves. Just like news information now, people already know how to rank the value of content by clicking.
However, EMC is different from the company represented by Google, and its products directly face consumers. It is a company that provides information infrastructure including software and hardware technology to the above companies. Openness is not always correct, so how does EMC plan to deal with it in terms of ensuring production efficiency and protecting trade secrets and intellectual property rights?
EMC divides it into two points. First of all, it is manifested in the control of the project content. "We are mainly open to the technical direction in the next three to five years." Fan Chenggong said that in this regard, although one of the possible consequences is beneficial to competitors, the whole industry can grow rapidly. "As a market leader in this field, it will benefit no less from the overall prosperity of the industry than other beneficiaries."
Second, it is manifested in process control. Generally speaking, R&D process includes basic research, modeling, new function development, maintenance and development of mature products, testing, localization and so on. EMC Innovation Network mainly focuses on basic research and high-end front-end development. "At the back end of innovation, we will continue to use some more traditional and better-controlled processes to ensure efficiency."
In terms of intellectual property protection, EMC intends to adopt a self-discipline approach, such as distinguishing in advance what kind of intellectual property rights it wants to enjoy and what kind of intellectual property rights the company needs to protect.
The profit behind the mirror
As the number one external disk storage system supplier in 19, the number one storage software supplier in 7 years, and the number one global storage software market revenue champion in 16 quarter, EMC invests 1 1% of its annual turnover in research and development. But is it right for commercial companies to open laboratories? This still seems to be a complicated problem. Many times, like astronauts who grew up in gravity, our instinct is not suitable for free fall.
"Intuitively, control and ownership are the right things, because most of our experience is dealing with tangible property, which may be coveted if outsiders cannot be excluded." James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University Law School and one of the founders of the American Center for Public Studies, said in his speech: "But imagine, will we still laugh at the World Wide Web, the first human network established by 199 1? Will you still laugh at open source software and get information from Google? "
Similarly, in terms of risks and benefits, EMC also believes that it is worthwhile to launch this innovative Grenade: "Any investment has risks, but nothing is more risky than investing in innovation, talent training and technology development."