Vidhya Srinivasan

Innovation at other companies

As I was researching innovation at other technology companies, I found a couple I thought was worth sharing with all of sun.

1. Innovation at Intuit - Intuit has a Google labs like approach where they release "beta" like software for FREE to customers. It is just roughly baked ideas that they make available to customers and get their feedback. They call it "RoughCuts". Unlike Google labs, they do not try to graduate every roughcut into diamonds :-) . Their Terms of Use is pretty extensive to cover illegal use of the software. Its worth checking out their site - Intuit Roughcuts

2. Innovation at BT - I did not expect to see this sort of Web 2.0 embracing from a telecom company. They share and evangelize practices within BT and also to the community. Their focus to innovate has been through partnerships with university's and also business schools to get the right mix of bright ideas with the biz skills to productize it. They have innovation classified into categories . BT looks and sounds more like a software company then a telecom company. Link - British Telecom Innovation zone I am hoping to look at a couple more like HP and Yahoo to see what their approach is.

Posted at 08:55PM Feb 12, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Social networking - SaaS platform

Sun has been really good at coming up with products but we don't necessarily think about what happens after sales. We talk a about providing support for our products and in the same conversation, talk about reducing the support costs. If we can deliver the right services and tools/ways to help customers to self-resolve issues/questions, may be we do not have to worry about costs so much.

Companies are doing it well. The equation seems to be pretty straight-forward.

Product + Service(s) + Community = Successful Product

Sun definitely has all the variables in this equation but have to deliver it together to be successful. We think about service after the product has been launched. We talk about building a community in a reactive manner. I think, given the web and the innovation around it, there are a lot of tools that enable companies to deliver the successful product equation.

As our team is working to incorporate some community aspects into the service delivery process, we were researching variety of platforms including Google Apps, our own support forums and other tools. One such platform is Kickapps.com. You should check it out. Like Google apps and Ning, it is a SaaS for social networking at no or minimal cost.

I will have more after some research and evaluation.

Enjoy.

Posted at 09:50AM Jan 31, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Innovation Index

Interesting way to assess the innovation confidence level across the globe. There is an Institute along with participation from companies like Microsoft and HP to help study the correlation between the performance level of an organization with innovation. It sounds very interesting. It might be worth following closely on the studies or the results from this institute. Below are the links that are worth reading ..

Article about the Innovation Confidence Level
Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity

At Sun, we have a lot of innovative ideas and products. I think the biggest challenge for us has been to go to market it with it. We start well and when we get half way through or close, something happens - end result, we don't go through with it. I have a list of at-least 4 to 5 projects that I am aware of that fall into that category. In-fact, one of the products that my team is working on currently went through that life-cycle. It might be worth understanding the factors to get over this hump as it seems to be obstructing our innovation confidence index.

Posted at 10:25PM Jan 27, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[1]

What does the term Innovation mean to you?

I was reading some articles on the web and became really curious to find out what the term "Innovation" meant to everybody.

Innovation, according to the thesaurus means "something new or different introduced ". Let me state my perspective of what it is not - It is NOT invention. Innovation could be a new process, service, product, culture shift and on and on..I think of innovation as a way that influences the community in a positive and exciting way. Lets take Apple products as an example. Apple just introduced the Macbook Air. Now thats innovation..just when you think Apple is done with improvements on the laptops, they wow us again. In this case, innovation was taking an existing product and improving it, in ways that nobody would have expected.

I call something an innovation when you can take an idea from concept to launch and it becomes ubiquitous. Thats when you know you have been successful. Innovation creates new trends, expectations and standards. Apple products are a testament to that. This raises another question - is innovation an organic process? Every company or person wants to innovate. Innovation will definitely disrupt the existing organization's culture - big or small. Change is the most important and supporting attribute for innovation.

My team asks me if we are really an Innovation Engineering team and my answer is "YES" and my reasons are stated above. How does innovation start?

1. Start with an idea - (could be new or an existing one),
2. Create POC
3. Presentation with the pitch to the decision maker
4. Implement and Launch

It is not innovation until the end result is wide practice of a process, product, service or a phenomenon. What do you guys think?

Posted at 09:51AM Jan 16, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[2]

Web 2.0 - what is it doing for users?

With every company in the technology world wanting to implement web2.0, are companies really thinking of the end users? Its great that companies or social networking sites want to make it easier for users/customers to personalize and share content. As a user who is trying to network and participate in the communities, I am struggling to keep up with the different sites, my profiles, contacts, address book, tag clouds ... i can go on and on. I have to log into 5 different sites to network, update my content and customize. So, the web 2.0 wave, has it really helped us?

At Sun, we have tried to integrate and help our web users to leverage tools like digg and delicious if they have accounts already for tagging etc. At the same time, we also have some homegrown implementations that causes yet another set of information that users have to maintain, remember and track. What can we do about this?

Well, to start one of the first things is to tackle Federated Identity Management. Also, wanted to share some positive efforts that are happening in this realm.

Data portability group

Great start to get the leading players to come together to create the ultimate Federated Profile for us. If that happens, imagine the possibilities for users.

1. Single online profile
2. Companies like Sun can easily just leverage the common services like tagging, etc

These are just a few benefits. That gets us ready for Web 3.0 and the semantic web... I would like to hear from some of you out there who have thoughts on this subject.

Posted at 09:55AM Jan 11, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Enabling Innovation collaboration

I had mentioned in my previous blog about reaching out to teams across sun and creating a funnel for innovative ideas. This is where some of the core concepts of web 2.0 come into play. At CEC, we got to look at CE 2.0 which did exactly that - Participate, Contribute and Share. Slynkr is another good example of a tool which is in used by SDN for this purpose.

Our team is looking to use the community aspects like what CE2.0 and Slynkr has, to enable the creation of the funnel.

1. Create a community
2. Enable the community to share ideas
3. Rate and Recommend ideas
4. Categorize ideas

All of the above feature enables the creation of funnel which will reflect the priorities of groups across Sun. Community is usually thought of as a group of engineers. In our organization, we are looking to get the management involved for help with prioritization of ideas. That will provide more visibility across the board and also encourage the flow of ideas into the funnel. In addition to this, we are planning to select and reward ideas based on various factors like "Cool Factor", "Market/Revenue Potential" etc.

I am sure some of you out there are already doing this or would be interested in working together with us. I will continue to share it with this community as we evolve this from a concept into execution.

Posted at 01:14PM Jan 09, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[3]

New Role

I work in Services and have been for most of my tenure at Sun (on my 8th year). I have had the privilege of working in different roles from an engineer to a manager on the engineering side and on the business side, as a business owner. I am glad to be part of this group of people in Services - part of the Services Product engineering group under Jon Greaves.

My new role is managing an Innovation Engineering team. The team is chartered with the rapid prototyping and development of new service products in close collaboration with the marketing teams across the lines of business. This is the first time since I have been at Sun that I have experienced this.

As far as I have been in Sun, services has always been an after thought. The creation of the Innovation Office within Services is an attempt to collaborate and reach out to the product teams and other innovation teams/projects within Sun. This accomplishes a couple of things

* Faster validation of innovative ideas with customers
* A single funnel for collecting, sorting and filtering ideas
* Inventory of things going on within the realm of sun, its products (services being part of the product solution)

All of this leading to the right focus and synergy to deliver the customer desired product and services with the ability to shrink costs and move towards a SaaS business model.

Now that I have given the benefits and reasons of this group, you are probably thinking, how can you engage us or rather how can we start the collaboration? We (Innovation Office) are working on an internal web-based tool to enable the collaboration and the funneling of ideas. We have just started. In the mean time, you can use ideas@sun.com as the point of contact.

Stay tuned for more..

Posted at 09:24AM Jan 02, 2008 by Vidhya Srinivasan in Sun  |  Comments[0]