I wrote about the Cisco I-Prize a few months ago – see Mining the Web and the World for Innovation. Last week Cisco announced their winner and I spoke to David Hsieh, Senior Director of Marketing for Cisco’s Emerging Technology Group about the wining team and the contest in general. I really like what they are doing so I am cross-posting this from FastForward. First, to summarize the contest, Cisco launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winners get to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. More specifically, the winning team has the opportunity to join Cisco, drive the development of their business idea and are eligible to receive a $250,000 cash prize. Cisco may then invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on the idea.
The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian. It is led by Anna Gossen, a computer science student at the Karlsruhe University in Germany. The other members include Niels Gossen, a computer science student at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Sergey Bessonnitsyn, a systems engineer from Russia. They are looking at the ways to using the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. David said their approach will look at more energy consumption at a more granular level to better forecast energy needs at a more granular and effective level. If the power company guesses too low there are “brown outs.” If they guess too high, which is the usual case, power is wasted.
In the initial phase, the contest attracted more than 2,500 entrepreneurs from 104 countries who presented 1200 ideas. The ideas were posted on the public site and others could promote or demote the idea. New teams were also formed as people saw potential partners with similar ideas. Cisco also encouraged this. The winning team acted together from the start like 25% of the other teams who went on to the next phase.
To participate in phase two, 32 ideas were selected. In some cases existing teams carried them forward and in other cases new were teams were formed. A third of these teams were multi-national like the winners. These teams were given Cisco's collaboration portfolio of Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications and the new Cisco WebEx® Connect application platform, to brainstorm their initial ideas, collaborate on the business plan, and virtually present their ideas to Cisco. See my recent post, Cisco WebEx Combine Strengths to Launch New Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform)
In the third, and final phase, twelve teams carried forward. They were given a lot of support and each had a Cisco team mentor who worked with them to further develop their business plan. At this phase, there was much more interaction with team via telepresence. There was a new emphasis on the people, as well as the idea, as the winners were to be offered jobs at Cisco.
Cisco is pleased with this experiment and investment. It validates the open collaboration model. They were one of the first large companies to try this. It is very counter to the current VC model in Silicon Valley. These funding and support resources are not available in most of the world and Cisco was able to engage people in 104 companies through the web. They did not do major promotion for this effort and did no marketing in many of the 104 countries were the participants live. They found that many people wanted their ideas to work as much as they wanted to make a lot of money on the idea. Many of the other eleven finalists are looking for ways to continue their idea.
I asked David about their lessons learned. The first one was to validate the desire to collaborate on the global scale. Cisco hoped this would happen but there was no certainty. Next time they may go bigger and bolder. I liked this idea when I first heard about it. I am very glad it succeeded. Perhaps the G7 should have a similar contest on alternative energy solutions and efforts to curtail global warming.
Will Cisco have this contest anually?
Posted by: Holly | July 27, 2009 at 01:31 PM