Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
Trends & Technologies n n n n When was Labs formed? Tere were a few different incarnations of it, but the current format started about three and a half years ago. How many people work in Labs? Approximately 30, but that’s misleading since my core team coordi- nates projects that leverage technology experts anywhere in the com- pany. Te virtual team is much larger and dynamically changes based on project needs, with people rotating in and out continually. Where is Labs located? Because of its dynamic nature, this question is hard to answer. If we just consider the core team, I’d say we are headquartered in San Fran- cisco, with staff in Chicago, Phoenix, San Rafael, France, and China. How are the groups within Labs formed? Some projects, like Project Showroom, are created in four different locations. Te project has a lot of specialty areas in it, like high-perfor- mance computing experts (people who know how to run clusters with thousands of cores), content schema experts, computer graphics global illumination experts, material science experts, Web design experts, data center experts, and so forth. So a project like Showroom spreads into several different areas and different teams globally. What is the group’s goal? Our primary goal is to engage a community of early adopters in the development of new design technologies. Everyone in the company has a role in innovation. Labs’ role is to sit in between our research teams and our product teams to develop inventions into innovations: We ma- ture horizontal technologies to prove they are ready for commercializa- tion by product teams. Take multi-touch, for instance. Four years ago, before the iPhone shipped or Windows 7 had multi-touch, Autodesk Labs did a bunch of “maturing” development in this area. From an invention point of view, multi-touch had been around since the 1970s, when universities were working on it. Several Autodesk researchers had in fact been work- ing with multi-touch for decades. But, obviously, multi-touch hadn’t become a practical innovation. Tat is where Labs came in: We took something possible and attacked some of the technological and business barriers to making it practical. We created several prototype products and engaged our community of customers to gather feedback. We are successful in maturing a technology when we are able to graduate a technology out of Labs and have a product team pick it up. What does Labs do, then? Te mission of Labs is to explore and validate new approaches to design technology through functional prototypes. Our vision, as I men- tioned, is to engage a community of early-adopter customers in the development process. We have a lot of R&D that happens directly in Labs, but we also take emerging technology from other parts of the company and connect it to our early-adopter user community. In a traditional product development process, new technology is kept secret until it hits beta. In that process, customers are only involved at the very end, where all you can do is fix bugs. In contrast, the Labs process is to take technology and involve customers in development from the very beginning. For example, we’ve taken emerging concepts like cloud rendering and built Project Showroom, or 3D software as a service (SaaS) and built Project Freewheel (for viewing and sharing designs over the Web), or application remoting and built Project Twitch (running applica- Based on SaaS, Autodesk’s Project Freewheel combines a dedicated Web site and a Web service for interactively viewing design data. Where do you find these early adopters? Mainly through our Web site. We have a community site (http:// labs.autodesk.com). We do a daily blog, and that gets a lot of traffic. We also have e-mails and newsletters. People in the know and who fol- low technology and Autodesk—the early adopters—find us. We also do various trade shows, like Autodesk University. How do you decide what to look at? My analogy is that I am the museum curator; I don’t make the art, but I choose what gets shown. Tere are others who create technology that may be too risky that’s not ready for prime time, or hasn’t been productized into a tangible prototype. Some stuff just doesn’t make the cut—it’s not thought provoking or doesn’t really need an early-adopter community to perfect it. Many of those technologies are handled by a product team. I try to keep most little utilities or productivity tools out of Labs. Tere are other avenues for those things. What do you look for in a technology? We are looking for horizontal tools and technologies that would make designers in any discipline more productive. Are you concerned about competitors stealing your ideas? Tat comes with being open, but it goes both ways. We’re dealing with immature technologies where others may copy us both in what works and what doesn’t work. We can be a catalyst that gets the en- tire industry involved in finding answers. By being open, we’re able to solicit a tremendous amount of user feedback that helps us shape the April 2010 27 tion trials over the Web). Each of those examples started out as a tangible prototype that evolved with customer feedback. Look at Freewheel: We took the idea of allowing people to collaborate using a SaaS model; early adopters—people who want a competitive advantage through technol- ogy—helped us grow it into a Web service that gets hundreds of thou- sands of hits per year. Tese users want to know what is coming down the line so they can shape it, form it, even before it may be practical.