I have been covering the
Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this
initiative. I spoke with Sharon
Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology
group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first
one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global
scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (see Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their
Global Collaboration).
So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco
tools including the following four.
Cisco Show and Share, a social video community where contest participants can record, edit and share video; comment, rate and tag interesting content; and use speech-to-text translation for video search and viewing.
Cisco Pulse,
a search platform that dynamically tags content as it crosses the network,
allowing contest participants to accurately locate and connect with the best
available experts and information on a particular topic.
Cisco WebEx™, an online meeting
platform for audio and Web conferencing that enables users to share documents
and desktops in real time.
Cisco TelePresence™,
an immersive, virtual meeting experience that combines real-time video, audio
and interactive technologies to give people in distributed global locations a
wide variety of face-to-face collaboration experiences.
The program was divided into the following four
categories:
The future of work:
Use the power of the network to bring together customers, suppliers and
associates to propose solutions that will change the way companies and
organizations do business.
The connected life:
Showcase technological advancements that will dramatically improve living
conditions and culture. This category will require people to envision a life of
seamless connectivity.
New ways to learn:
Create innovative solutions that will transform when, where and how people
learn.
The future of
entertainment: Devise next-generation solutions that will change
how people play.
The I-Prize event is targeted at those outside
the organization as they already have programs to encourage contributions from
employees. However, employees can participant in the various ways to comment on
and rate the entries. Cisco
introduced an IP point system to this second contest to create an ideas market.
The ideas market was build on the Spigit platform, a product I covered on this
blog before. Participants received IP points when they registered. They could
invest these points in ideas. There was a cap on the number of points you could
invest in any one idea to prevent gaming the system. As strong ideas emerged,
the investors’ points became more valuable. Participants also got more points
for their participation in the process and they could invest these.
A leader board allowed people to track ideas and
their points. You could also follow the point progress for people. This
transparency increased involvement as I have seen in many situations. In the
first contest there were 2,500 participants and 4,000 comments. In the second
one there were 3,000 participants and almost 12,000, comments. Many
participants said the leader board was very engaging and they followed it on a
frequent basis. I like this idea
and it showed that Cisco listened to participants.
The event was organized in three phases. In the
first phase, which lasted three months, the 3,000 people submitted over 800
ideas. These participants came from 156 countries. They could use video for
submissions and commentary. In the
second phase the field was reduced to thirty-two teams from twenty two
countries. Eight of these teams were picked through the IP point system, the
top two in each of the four categories advancing. The Cisco team picked the
other 24 idea teams. A team of ten
Cisco managers monitored the leader board process.
In the third phase nine finalist teams presented
their ideas to Cisco using telepresence. These nine teams were composed of
people from 14 countries on six continents. The wining team received a $250,000 prize. Like all
participants they retained the intellectual property rights and Cisco licensed
their idea for an undisclosed sum.
The team was composed of five students from Mexico: Darius Lau
Castro and his teammates Lizett Michel Gallegos, Claudia Alexandra Vargas
Prieto, Guillermo Antonio Araiza Torres and Juan Rodrigo Huerta Manning. You can see the announcement on the left with members of the winning team on screen.
They proposed an online “Life
Account” to create a physical and virtual platform that facilitates
connectivity along with smart objects, people and information. Life Account
collects data about its users through devices that capture information both
from the users’ activities in the physical and virtual world. This data is then
aggregated to generate a virtual profile that understands habits and behavior
patterns to conveniently blend the physical and virtual world for the user.
The winning idea from the first contest also came
from students and it was directed at effective energy management. You can see a
photo of the announcement of the winning team on the left. The winning team
contained two Germans and a Russian. It was 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 were looking at ways to use the network as the platform for visibility,
manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems.
It has now been folded into Cisco’s energy management offering. Two of the finalists from the first
contest made it to the finals in the second year.
I think this is a great example of crowd-sourcing with a clearly define process and the right supporting collaborative tools. It continues to improve. I look forward to seeing what changes they may make to the next competition.
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