Technological change, societal demands, hyper-competition, and the digital transformation of the economy have increased the pressure upon companies to shift from incremental innovation to disruptive and strategic innovation: Today it is all about disrupting or being disrupted.
Cisco exemplifies a company that continues to disrupt its marketplace. In 2015, Cisco kicked off its first and unique company-wide Innovate Everywhere Challenge. The goal was to drive global disruptive thinking, capture game-changing innovation opportunities from Cisco employees, help them grow and enhance employee experience, empowerment, and collaboration across all functions. Along the lines of "Team up, Disrupt, and Innovate". Cisco established the Innovate Everywhere Challenge as a vehicle to shape its future growth. Supported by ITONICS collaborative innovation platform, the Innovate Everywhere Challenge is now a best practice for innovation management at Cisco.
| 49 percent of all employees participated |
36,600 participants worldwide |
89 participating countries |
769 venture ideas submitted |
Using a collaborative platform, we were able to implement the Innovate Everywhere Challenge as an integral part of our innovation management and engage a worldwide community to team up and innovate together. We achieved a Cisco-wide cultural change and created an interconnected network of innovators.
Alex Goryachev, Director of Innovation Strategy, Cisco
The Innovate Everywhere Challenge consists of four phases running over a period of eight months - supported by the collaborative innovation management platform ITONICS Enterprise.
Who: All Cisco employees
Cisco employees worldwide are invited to participate, team up, and submit ventures to the innovation
platform powered by ITONICS. The “(Co-)Founders” create and submit ventures, “Angels” can invest tokens to select the best ventures and help them to succeed. The platform ensures a quality gate and self-assessment. Besides stating a problem and providing a solution, the ventures submitted are categorized by market, technology, and business models.
ITONICS CampaignsITONICS Campaigns is a digital innovation tool for running solution-oriented idea campaigns. Are you facing problems or questions you can‘t solve on your own? Bring together various internal and external experts on one platform to work on challenges within your innovation landscape. You can run for example time-bound or always-on ideation campaigns and engage colleagues, clients, partners and students to leverage game-changing ideas. |
Who: 30 semi-finalists
120 expert judges select 30 semi-finalists after a pre-selection through employee token investment. The semi-finalists are invited to participate in a three-day workshop to further develop their ventures using design thinking and lean startup methodologies.
Who: Six finalists
The third phase is all about convincing. The six finalists receive an award of $10,000 as recognition and start looking for an internal executive sponsor. The finalists live-pitch their ventures to a panel of
internal and external industry leaders including a Q&A session to identify the winners of the challenge. In a company-wide live broadcast, the judges ask the teams probing questions regarding the feasibility, viability, and desirability of their ventures.
About CiscoCisco is a global market leader in the IT and technology sector. When it comes to the development and linking of networks or the automation and integration of IT-based products and services, Cisco – with its more than 30 years of experience – is the enabler in an increasingly digital world. Founded in San Francisco in 1984, this company today has a global headcount of more than 74,000 employees working at more than 380 locations. Cisco constantly seeks to transform how people connect, communicate and collaborate. |
To learn more about the tools and capabilities that help Cisco and other innovation leaders grow, browse through our digital tools or contact our expert team right away.
The ITONICS Innovation Software helps organizations to take their innovation management to the next level. If you want to learn more, visit our product overview or get a free trial of our software.
