Think BOLD: Creating Possibilities for Greatness

Sanjeev Mervana arrives at the conversation wearing a Cisco Bold Bets hoodie. It is a small detail, but a fitting introduction to an innovation program that combines strategic direction with participation across employees, customers and partners. The hoodie itself is one of the ways the program recognizes involvement.

The harder question is what happens after people contribute. An open invitation can produce more ideas than a team can use. A promising concept still needs market evidence, technical work and the right people to carry it forward. Interest in the program can also fade.

In this Innovation Rockstars episode, Mervana describes how Cisco's Emerging Technologies and Incubation group approaches those challenges. His account of bold thinking is specific about the discipline behind it: define the problem, test the opportunity and build a team suited to the work ahead.

Give people a problem to work on

Asked how the program avoids being overwhelmed by ideas, Mervana acknowledges that the team learned the hard way. Broad participation needs direction if the resulting ideas are going to be useful.

The program uses focus areas and challenges to give contributors a shared problem while leaving room for different solutions. Employees bring what they see in their work; customers and partners bring experiences from their own environments. The diversity is valuable because it produces different approaches to a relevant need.

“You have employees, partners, etc. all focused around solving a specific set of problems, but they all provide different solutions.”

Those focus areas connect to strategy. Mervana describes looking at emerging markets, their distance from existing businesses and the time they might need to develop. Incubation can explore unfamiliar territory while retaining a clear reason for Cisco to be interested in it.

For an R&D leader, that makes the challenge brief an important decision. Too broad, and the team struggles to compare the submissions. Too narrow, and contributors have little room to bring a different perspective. Mervana's emphasis is on directing the problem without prescribing every answer.

Test the business and the technology together

Bold Bets considers both market potential and technical feasibility. Mervana describes looking for meaningful differentiation, using the possibility of a tenfold improvement as an ambition to investigate, rather than a result every project has achieved.

Early work includes scouting, market research and looking at other players. The team needs to understand whether it can offer something different before committing to an MVP.

An MVP then creates an opportunity to test beyond paper analysis. Mervana describes working with design partners who share the problem and can participate in the learning. A repeatable use case and evidence of product-market fit provide a basis for considering commercialization or routes through existing channels.

That sequence connects technical experimentation with a business question. Can the team build something useful, and is there a market in which the usefulness can be repeated? Neither answer can be assumed from an attractive concept alone.

Mervana applies the same caution to emerging collaboration technologies. Something can be technically exciting and still arrive before customers are ready to use it. Timing and the specific customer problem remain part of the decision.

Assemble the team like a film crew

One of Mervana's most memorable comparisons concerns staffing. He describes a “flash team” approach, drawing an analogy with making a movie.

A production has a defined goal and brings together different skills to achieve it. The point is to organize the capabilities needed for the task without immediately creating a large permanent organization around a small piece of work.

Project stages require different combinations. Early work may need people who understand markets, startups or the investment community. Building the concept demands technical capability. Other stages may require a different entrepreneurial skill set.

The resources do not all have to sit in the incubation group. Mervana describes working across Cisco teams and with customers and partners because no single group holds every relevant skill.

Participation can also offer development opportunities. Rotational assignments let employees spend time in another area and build experience. Alongside monetary incentives and recognition, those opportunities give people a personal reason to join the work.

Keep the learning visible when an idea stops

Mervana is candid about sustaining engagement. Interest can drop, and he does not suggest Cisco has found a perfect formula.

“It's a roller coaster.”

Targeted challenges are one way to bring people together again. Another is to make the work visible even when an idea is not taken further. He describes an open-mic format where participants can share ideas and what they learned.

Some ideas contribute to patents. Others remain in a library where a future team can find them. Someone exploring a related problem might discover that a colleague has already done useful thinking and invite that person into a new flash team.

The important distinction is between stopping a particular project and losing everything associated with it. The learning, connections and people can remain useful, even when the original concept does not become a product.

Treat innovation as ongoing work

During the episode's quick-fire questions, Mervana rejects the idea that innovation can be confined to a particular week. It needs to be part of how the organization works.

That expectation also appears in his personal account of the job. He values being challenged and seeing the work help customers and communities. The program's structure gives that motivation somewhere to go: a relevant problem, a route to testing it and a team that can change as the work develops.

The hoodie makes participation visible. What sustains it is the opportunity to contribute to real work, learn something useful and find a place for that learning in the next challenge.