National Instruments: Marshalling Communities to Create Customers for the Future
by John Pasquarette, Vice President, Product Marketing – Software, National Instruments
John will show how National Instruments (NI) achieved a stunning, strategic success by marshalling its customer communities in a successful, high-profile cause marketing effort. NI's long-term goal is to increase visibility and usage of its programming language, LabVIEW. John will show how his team partnered with philanthropist and inventor Dean Kamen's FIRST Robotics competition, which attracts 1700 high school teams culminating in a Super Bowl-type event in the Georgia Dome each Spring. The goal: get these customers and engineers of the future to successfully use LabVIEW over traditional programming language approaches to control their robots. It was a high risk effort: the kids had only 6 weeks to master the language and build their robots. If the students' first experience with NI products had been bad, the entire project would have backfired. John will show how NI's communities played a critical role in bringing together existing experts with the student teams to drive success significantly beyond initial goals.