VMware Inc. engineers who submitted technical papers for consideration at this year’s Radio event, the company’s “Research And Development Innovation Offsite” gathering, had a better chance of getting admitted to the University of Notre Dame (19 percent) or passing the bar exam in California (27 percent) than making the cut to present their work.

Only 200 of the 1,200 papers submitted for last week’s Radio event were accepted, according to Rajiv Ramaswami (pictured), chief operating officer at VMware. That’s an acceptance rate of 16 percent. That’s tough.

“We run Radio much like any world-class technical conference that the Association for Computing Machinery or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers would run,” Ramaswami said. “There’s a very high bar.”

Ramaswami spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Radio 2018 event in San Francisco. They discussed the various innovation programs available to engineers inside VMware and how the Radio experience helps foster a collaborative approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Tech talks and hackathons fuel interest

That 1,200 VMware engineers would seek to participate in the event speaks not only to the prestige it offers for acceptance, but the climate of innovation the company seeks to foster. The combination of engineering culture and community starts with weekly tech talks inside the firm where anyone can bring a group of people together, and internal hackathons run at VMware’s research sites throughout the year.

From there, the opportunities escalate to more formal programs, such as Flings, where company engineers can release beta versions of projects for evaluation and testing by users, and xLabs, where potential new technology is centrally funded. “I don’t believe you can simply drive innovation from the top,” Ramaswami said. “It has to come from within.”

Networking is a key element of the Radio experience as well. The VMware executive recently came across a group of engineers in the company’s core virtualization platform who were working on technology for fast data movement. He put them in touch with another group taking an innovative approach to hybrid connectivity.

“You make those informal connections here, and then off they run,” Ramaswami said. “We’re constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It’s never static.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Radio 2018. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Radio 2018. Neither VMware Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE