Cisco Innovate Everywhere Challenge

Disrupt or be disrupted

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.

To avoid being displaced by more agile competitors, leading companies must reinvent themselves from the inside out, again and again, and incorporate innovation into their DNA. The entrepreneurial passion, speed, and agility of a newcomer must be regained while continuing to grow like a large corporation.

Today it is all about disrupting or being disrupted!

profil-alex-goryachev-bw — Alex GoryachevDirector of Innovation Strategy, Cisco

Innovation at Cisco

Cisco is a company that continues to disrupt its marketplace. When it launched its first company-wide Innovate Everywhere Challenge, Cisco's goal was to encourage disruptive thinking, identify opportunities for transformational innovation, and promote collaboration between all departments.

Supported by the ITONICS platform, the Innovate Everywhere Challenge is now a best practice for innovation management at Cisco and won the Innovation Leader’s Impact Award which honors extraordinary innovation programs and their outcomes.

Innovation = Cisco's DNA
Innovation is the job of every employee. It transcends traditional business unit silos.
The annual Innovate Everywhere Challenge calls out to all 74,000 Cisco full-time employees to "Team up, Disrupt, and Innovate".

Objectives

Engage a global community: Promote disruptive thinking across business units, geographies, and grade levels.
Entrepreneurial culture: Create a company-wide entrepreneurial mindset. Drive innovation further into the corporate culture.
New business opportunities: Identify disruptive ventures and help them grow into game-changing opportunities for Cisco.

profil-mathilde-durvy-bw — Mathilde DurvyInnovation Program Lead, Cisco

A company-wide innovation challenge on a digital platform

The Innovate Everywhere Challenge consisted of four phases over eight months - powered by ITONICS.

Challenge phases

1. Ideate

Cisco employees worldwide are invited to participate, team up, and submit ventures to the innovation platform ITONICS Enterprise.

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 selfassessment. Besides stating a problem and providing a solution, the ventures submitted are categorized by market, technology, and business models.

2. Validate

3. Fund

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.

4. Build

Achievements

The innovation program was awarded with the Innovation Leader's Impact Award.
Open engagement, cross-functional team building, and exchange are facilitated via the open collaboration platform.
36,600 employees (49 % of Cisco’s workforce) from 89 countries and every single function engaged in the challenge.
More than 769 ventures were submitted and reviewed by over 120 expert judges.
Over 20,000 employees invested more than 168,000 tokens and provided over 5,700 comments.
Addressing key markets, new technologies, and business models created a more targeted challenge focused on capturing game-changing opportunities for Cisco.
The challenge spawned an entrepreneurial workforce across all functions, geographies, and grade levels ready to take risks, fail fast, and move forward quickly to the next innovative idea.
Participants were equipped with a wealth of online and in-person resources, including design thinking, lean startup methodologies, pitch coaching, and internal as well as external mentors.
A quality gate and self-assessment helped progress the best ideas.
20 executives sponsored ventures with seed fundings. The winning teams received $25,000 in seed funding and an additional $25,000 in team recognition.