Innovation is the fuel for our world’s economy, and a driver for global human progress

Loren (Chris) Hotchkiss, Vice President, Data Center Group, General Manager of Platform Execution and Validation, Intel Corporation

Innovation in how you develop new products and solutions for existing or new businesses can lead to a transformation in your R&D development approach. However, innovation doesn’t have to always mean new technical inventions.  Innovation can reuse an existing method or technique from one domain to solve a complex problem in another domain.

As a leader at Intel, I have encountered such situations several times, where we need to balance new product development from grounds up vs. adapting existing products and processes. There are no easy answers, and this talk will present a real-life example. It happened following a growth of public clouds, and the fact that computing is increasingly moving to remote locations, where users have no direct control on the servers running their jobs. Customers with sensitive workloads needed a method to assure that their remote servers are trustworthy.

This talk will cover how we took an interesting technology from our labs, previously productized in clients, and we brought it to Intel servers in 12 months’ time. This rapid adoption was driven with a laser sharp customer focus, resulting in multiple public clouds successfully deploying our new technology for their end-users.  We will review this transformation and conclude the talk with general principles to drive similar innovations in other domains too. This will include the culture and mindset changes needed to foster innovations, motivating teams in a company to move fast, adopt new methods for new businesses and markets, and to always keep learning and growing.

Loren (Chris) Hotchkiss is a Vice President in the Data Center Group, and serves as general manager of Platform Execution and Validation at Intel Corporation. He is responsible for the roadmap execution, validation, and system integration of Data Center Platforms. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and MBA from Portland State University. Chris started his journey at Intel in 1991, as a quality and reliability engineer. In the last 28 years at Intel, Chris has held a variety of technical and management roles in technology manufacturing development, semiconductor quality and reliability, phone and tablet client products, smart glasses. He led teams across systems engineering and architecture, and data center platforms. Chris is passionate about motivating teams, and solving customer problems with high quality products.  He enjoys spending time at his alma mater Portland State University, where he guest lectures and stays connected to the academic community.