Cisco ended the Challenge with a game show to reveal the top 3 winners.
I served as an entrepreneurial coach for the recent Cisco Innovate Everywhere Challenge, which sparked ideas from more than 2,000 internal innovators around the world.
As Cisco Innovation Director Alex Goryachev told Innovation Leader, “We’re an amazing company with 30 years’ history of innovation. It’s a phenomenal place to work. As we get older, we’re certainly getting smarter and wiser, but we get slower as well … The industry is going through a rapid shift. Every day, we’re discovering new startups, new competitors. We’re challenged in every marketplace where we operate.
Cisco learned from the experiences of other corporate entrepreneurs, including people at GE.
“The world is changing, and it’s changing overnight. The new ideas, they’re rapidly coming from everywhere. The change is really exponential … We wanted to make sure that we increase [our] speed, and we create a new culture of innovation.”
So Alex decided to stage an internal competition among employee entrepreneurs, the Innovate Everywhere Challenge. It was a stunning success. Here’s a video:
And here’s my blog about my experience working with corporate entrepreneurs at Cisco.