Monday, August 7, 2017

INSIGHTS FROM CISCO:
Igniting a Startup Culture with Co-Innovation Inside and Out


PRESENTER
Alex Goryachev
Senior Director, Corporate Strategy and Innovation Group

Cisco Systems

SESSION ABSTRACT

No company – no matter how big or established -- can dominate innovation by itself anymore because of the hyper-accelerated pace and complexity of change. Mass disruption of industries and business models are the new and chaotic normal in this era of mass digitization. Today, it’s imperative that companies co-innovate customer solutions to keep up and succeed at a time when unforeseen competition can come from anywhere, any time. At Cisco, the most valuable co-innovation comes from synergies realized by two vital and interdependent sources: external startups, partners or even customers, and the entrepreneurial talent already inside the organization.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS
  • Success factors in developing a dynamic external ecosystem of innovation partners, including accelerators, incubators, startups, entrepreneurs, and application developers
  • Insight on igniting a startup culture within by unleashing the full potential and passion of employee talent
  • Proven ways to synergize both external and internal co-innovation experiences to become more competitive, retain and attract top talent, and to shape the workforce of the future

Alex Goryachev: Our company was founded 30 years ago. It was two cables and a desire to connect. Large companies are made for scale. Some companies missed out—the companies that died. Listening to employees, customer and market trends is best.

In 2020, most of the Fortune 500 companies will be gone. What’s driving that is a shift in consumer behavior. We’re seeing new business models everywhere. The pace of change in increasing, and there are new business models, like UBER, LYFT, AirBnb, Amazon, Prosper, and LiquidSpace. Amazon transformed the book market, then electronics, and how we buy things, now they have retail pop-ups. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to start a business. There are way more businesses starting up than 10 years ago.

Disrupt or be disrupted:
  • The speed of innovation is accelerating
  • Ideas can come from anywhere
  • If we don’t act, our employees will leave and act on their own
  • If we don’t act, our employees will leave and act on their own
  • Competitive landscape shifts constantly
  • Leaders are confused
  • It’s a challenging environment
  • Talent is essential
  • Focus on the innovators not the innovation

TAKE-AWAY

Lending has changed. People are no longer buying storage or infrastructure. Now, with technology, you can start a business anywhere. It’s a low entry point. Or you can crowdsource a business. Every day we wake up in a different world. We don’t know who our competitors are. There are more consumers because of globalization. We’re noticing everything is super-fast. Our employees leave and start their own businesses. Our competitors go in and out of business every day. In the past we had dominant players we would compete with. Now there are small companies are chipping away at our wallet. We are now competing with hundreds of companies. This causes so much confusion. Everything is changing. This is the new normal.

What is the solution? Think like a startup! We establish pockets of startups within the company so we can move faster. Everyone has a common purpose. When people are highly engaged and focused they can sometimes change the world.

Cisco Innovation Strategy

Traditionally we were building stuff. We were selling to customers. Now, we buy companies for three reasons:
  1. We like the team
  2. Intellectual property
  3. Route to market/relationships
When we buy a company, we hope that we acquire all three of the above. We move into partner mode. Today we think of partnership as a model. We are investing in our partner companies. Right now we are accelerating. You get to work with startups. As we discover startups, we don’t want to acquire them. We want them to develop on top of Cisco. It can be a university too. We have shifted from building to a solutions world where we partner with many people.

Cisco Innovation Centers

Our goal is to get an idea, customer, or startup and see if we can partner with them. We’ll make money, we are quick to monetize. We have 9 of these centers. They are all over the world. The goal is to create a strategic presence. There are 5 – 10 people in these centers.

Innovating with Employees

In the past, there was no way to innovate outside the box, which led to many silos. We put together a program that’s structured. We work with our employees. We give them themes to innovate. We give them resources and tools. Time off to implement their ideas. The goal is to give everyone a role in innovation. How do you get everyone aligned to innovation? Angel personas are important. We’re building a role for coaches, mentors, judges etc.

We want them to focus on the business outcome. If we think about drones, focus their ideas on this area. We encourage people to form teams. The goal is to get people thinking about their daily jobs. We follow a structured process and it has been successful: 52 percent participated—in a company of 30,000 people. We gave them $1,000 for innovative projects. At first, there was a lot of resistance from managers. It’s going in the right direction. There are opportunities to work with like-minded people.

One catch: you cannot innovate within your day job. Not a rewards and recognition program. We have spent $1 million dollars so far.

TAKE-AWAY
  • Listen to employees, customer and market trends
  • Create an entrepreneurial environment within your organization
  • You are now competing with hundreds of companies
IMPLEMENTATION GUIDELINES
  • Diversify the silos (engineers with engineers, marketing with marketing)
  • Listen to employees as much as you do customers
  • Be aware that consumers are way more savvy than in the past
BEST PRACTICE
  • Innovate with your employees
  • Give all employees a role in innovation
  • Offer a cash reward
ACTION ITEM
  • Be thoughtful with your employees, they have good ideas
  • Understand that the price of entry to the marketplace is inexpensive, so your competitors can come from anywhere
  • Listen to your employees

FINAL THOUGHT

Every day we wake up in a different world. We don’t know who our competitors are. To stay ahead of the curve, Cisco has implemented an internal entrepreneurship program for their employees. Their participation rate of 52 percent of 30,000 employees was a huge surprise to this 30-year old.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Panel Discussion: User-Centered Design

MODERATOR
Kevin Goldman
Former Chief Design Architect
Tallwave

PANELISTS
Michael Flynn, Vice President, Innovation & Strategy,
Bank of the West

Chris Kampf, Director of Product Innovation, Amtrol Inc.
Andy Lee, Senior Manager, Innovation Labs,
Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Deepankar Pant, Senior Brand Manager, Innovation,
Jarden Home Brands

Jonathan Mann, Director, User Experience Design, PayPal

SESSION ABSTRACT
Who’s leading your user-centered design program? Is their team scaling to meet your incredible demands for customer centricity? Although there are 20,000 unfilled experience-design jobs in the U.S., the major design schools graduate only 500 candidates a year. This interactive session featured innovation and design leaders sharing their strategies and tips for getting the most from user-centered design.

Among the insights: Designers have a method in which they think about and solve problems. The key to their problem solving strategy is empathy. Designers must empathize with the user since the user is typically not present during the decision making process. This process involves diverging, converging, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Design-thinking also requires much building, testing, measuring, and pivoting. Kevin Goldman facilitated a panel to share the philosophies, processes, and tools around design-thinking.

KEY TAKE-AWAY
  • Best practices to galvanize customer centricity across teams
  • Guidelines to know when and what to in source versus outsource
  • Approaches to measure customer experience and design
  • Vocabulary for successful user-centered company cultures

KEY DISCUSSION POINTS
What have you seen some companies do when it comes to incorporating the customer in the design-thinking process when the customer is not the user?

This can happen in situations where the customer is a wholesaler or distributor of the product, but not necessarily the daily user of the product. It’s important to include all stakeholders in the design-thinking process. Include customers in the conversations because they’re thinking about things totally differently as a stakeholder. They may be considering factors such as merchandising and packaging.

We’re four steps away from the end customer. We’re the manufacturer, than we have a wholesaler and others. The end-user may not even know we’re involved. How do we have that user in mind? How do we innovate in a way that incorporates all customers/users?

Utilize a vast group of sales representatives that can go across the country to get a good cross-section of the demand that is out there. Representations can assess: where there are more types of a specific sale in one region of the country than another, information about the user of the product early on, what they see in the field, and what customers/users are talking.

Field testing is important because users can utilize all of their senses to get a feel for the product and offer their opinions in the process. Users can touch, feel, and see the product and help move the design-thinking process along.

When coming up with the product concept, determine if your plan is cost effective, as well as what the right type of business model would be for your product. Attend trade shows and selectively pull people to get their input to start making decisions regarding design and direction.

There are a variety of ways you can connect with customers and users throughout the process to gather feedback.

I find it interesting you don’t recommend starting with financials after the field test. What if you have a really great product that could be well-received but financials don’t work out? Doesn’t it make sense to confirm financials are not an issue before moving too far along the design process?

A lot of things would probably get killed and never tried if we talk about money first. It’s important to play with the ideas first and create a plan. Once we see if a product can work, we can always figure out how to make it less expensive and keep working at it. We don’t want to preemptively shut down an idea solely because of financials.

BEST PRACTICE
The Four “Rights” of User Testing – The following factors are imperative in the design thinking process. If one of these factors is missing, the process does not work. You need to find:

  1. The right users for the product
  2. The right methodology to conceptualize the product, gaining feedback from users, and continuing to design the product
  3. The right analysis. What do you do with your observations? Do you analyze the data properly or are you lost? This step is very important to continue pivoting to create the best product that will be well-received by users
  4. The right time for the product

When developing prototypes, an example of a good field testing strategy is when you actually hand a notebook to a customer during testing and get the customer to sketch their ideal product.

During early prototyping, create products or services that are delightful for customers but increase revenue for the company. Understand what users see as the key challenge and understand what the solutions begin to look like. The key to innovation is enhancing the reward for the customer. Your goal is to make the user experience more joyful and minimize the chore by creating new products or changes to current products that improve usability, speed, efficiency, aesthetics, etc.

Rapid prototyping involves quickly coming up with prototypes that are ready to move into the new product pipeline. Lab testing with both customers and unlikely customers can help move this process forward. One example of this is Google Glass. While many people would think innovation can take a long time, it took less than one day to create the prototype for Google Glass.

FINAL THOUGHT
Separate market research from the user design process. Market research is really good for understanding the market before actually involving the user. User design is different from building, prototyping, etc. You don’t know the true opportunity until after you’ve involved the user in the process.