Innovation Networks at Intel Research - SwarmCreativity in Industry

Intel Advanced Research consists of a collection of COINs, communicating with each other in a small world network. Under the leadership of David Tennenhouse, the company’s director of research, Intel sources a crucial part of its advanced research out to its network of Lablets – small research labs, co-located at prominent universities such as UC Berkeley, University of Washington Seattle, Carnegie-Mellon University, and University of Cambridge in England. Lablet staff comprises an equal share of professors and doctoral students on temporary leave from the university and Intel employees. Although Tennenhouse and the Lablet directors define the overall strategic research agenda, researchers at the Lablets have wide-ranging freedom to pursue their own interests. Research teams, usually spanning different Lablets, form their own smaller COINs, while the combined Lablets form a knowledge network that reaches into the hosting universities and the central Intel research labs.

PlanetLab is one of Intel Advanced Research’s early successes. A network of computers located at sites around the world, PlanetLab forms a platform for creating and deploying planetary-scale services – massive applications that span a significant part of the globe – such as global content distribution and file-sharing. Applications running on PlanetLab are decentralized, with pieces running on many machines spread across the global Internet. They can also self-organize to form their own networks. No university could afford to deploy the large network of computers required to create PlanetLab, so Intel jumpstarted the project by contributing the first 100 nodes, the initial software implementation, and key sites. Having been nurtured in the Intel Lablets for some years, digital video content distribution has now announced by Intel and Hewlett-Packard as a first PlanetLab commercial application.
Intel Lablets leverage the latest results of high-tech research. Teams collaborate to achieve shared goals, while concurrently competing with and learning from their competitors. The rules are transparent and clear for everybody, and the team functions as a meritocracy.