Intel Innovation - Exploratory Research as Sectors

Exploratory Research as Sectors

David Tennenhouse, Director of Intel Research, defined exploratory research as "research that fell outside of Intel's silicon 'roadmap' and the plan that focused most of the firm's R&D resources on technologies that would ensure Moore's Law continued to hold in [the] future". With the exploratory research divided into different sectors, the company eventually mainly focused on microelectrical mechanical system (MEMS), distributed systems (ubiquitous computing), biotechnology, and machine learning (statistics and machine vision).

Intel Research focuses on many of the different innovation strategies to put the company at a competitive advantage. The review process implemented for introducing new projects not only focuses on product innovation, but also process innovation at the same time. "Every two years, we have a research planning summit where about 100 of the company's leading technologists meet to discuss new topics that have surfaced internally, externally - or just on [the] folks' personal 'radar'." This increases product innovation as many of the great minds around the world bring their ideas to Intel Research which have potential in great success. Furthermore, the fashion that the company continuously changes the way it conducts its business to ensure the continuous inflow of new ideas show that they also value process innovation. "Tennenhouse realized that while the uses of university-grant funding and internal research projects were central to building an exploratory research network, there was a missing piece...in response to these concerns, he decided to set up a number of labs close to existing universities."

In addition to the company's focus on product and process innovation, Intel Research had a mission that focused on radical innovation by accepting "some 'outlier' grants and SRPs and corporate venture investments" every two years and incremental innovation in the long run as the company felt it was "important to periodically review whether we have the right sectors."

With the constant review of information available within the sectors, Intel Research also had both competence enhancing and destroying innovation . Through incremental innovation, the company is able to build on existing knowledge when projects showed potential or destroying existing knowledge if the company felt "nothing much was happening." For example, "we had an effort on robotics that ramped up too early... by cutting it off early on, we left the door open to re-enter this space later."

However, dividing all the research up into sectors only allows Intel Research to focus on component rather than architectural innovation. Information gained only occurs within each distinct research lab, it does not allow for "change in the overall design" but only "change within the component."

Since Intel was founded, the company has been widely known for the development of technology for silicon-based chips. As the technology behind this plays such a large role in our everyday lives today, the company has focused its core competency development on "advances in silicon manufacturing processes and chip packaging." For example, after the completion of the project, Planetlab, at the Berkeley lablet, there were concerns on what to do with the results as it seemed to benefit one of Intel's competitors. If Intel had decided to profit from its findings, the product would have required the use of chips built by Advanced Micro Devices. Determined to maintain its core competency, Intel decided to spin out the project to a University and keep the research for future use. "It's all about silicon at Intel." Despite challenges that arose in the 1990s, keeping to its silicon-based chips has kept Intel as one of the largest supplier of hardware parts to all other technology-based companies.

Given that Intel had developed a separate firm, Intel Research, to focus on research and development, the company's focus on exploratory research will definitely help develop absorptive capacity, which is "the ability of an organization to recognize, assimilate, and utilized new knowledge" as corresponding information would be readily available when newer technologies emerge. For example, one of the major projects that the Intel Berkeley lablet ran was "on the topic of ad-hoc networks of sensors." Given the popularity of wireless devices today, this project had "piggy-backed on earlier work at Berkeley that focused on 'motes' - silicon-based devices that integrated sensing computing and communication capabilities onto one tiny chip." Through absorptive capacity, by combining new information available with research that had already been done in the past, the ad-hoc networks of sensors were adopted by many companies, which included a winemaker that used the sensors to detect frost.

While covering many different innovation types and maintaining the same core competency that has benefited the company for years, Intel Research's strategies toward exploratory research is, for the most part, effective. However, given that the company is still mainly focused on each sector individually, a lack of architectural innovation may affect its competitive advantage.

Using Parallel Process to Generate New Ideas and the Impact on Product Development

Tennenhouse is following a similar research approach that he did in his part experience at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). "DARPA does research in order to create new capability. It doesn't care who creates the capability, as long asit can buy it. So [Tennenhouse] was looking at whether [he] could apply some of the aspects of DARPA model to the industry." In essence, DARPA follows a parallel process for structuring its research processes.More precisely, DARPA not only conducts its own internal research, but also participates in funding research conducted by universitiesand other smaller research organizations.

Advantages

Diversified Research Portfolio -"Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is a common saying when talking about portfolio diversification. By working on several fronts simultaneously, Intel was able to cover several sources of innovation at once. According to Shilling, there are five sources of innovation: Firms, Individuals, Universities, Private Non-Profits, and Government Funded Research. In order for Intel to position itself to be able to take advantage of businesses emerging from new technologies, Intel needs to cover all sources of innovation and to stay ahead