Our Innovation journey in the Enterprise (Part 1)

In this series, I will be sharing first-hand experiences and lessons learned -together with my friends Oseas Ramirez Assad and Andrew Africa- as we tried to reignite entrepreneurial spirit accelerating innovation speed at Cisco Systems. 

We did it with no executive mandate and no budget. We started and operated as a grassroots movement, created to accelerate the ability of internal teams to design the best Services, in less time, with fewer resources, leveraging innovation best practices. In just fourteen months we went from an idea shared among colleagues to building an acceleration engine.

StartupCisco, as the initiative was called, became the engine for Cisco’s successful and awarded Innovate Everywhere Challenge (three Gold Awards from Brandon Hall Group’s 2016 Excellence Awards program). Most importantly, ended up supporting dozens of internal startup teams with different ventures – all done operating as closely as possible to an internal bootstrapped startup inside a corporation. 

There is a healthy appetite these days -from small to Fortune-sized companies- to reap the benefits of adopting startup-like practices. It is certainly the right decision. Unfortunately, there are unrealistic expectations at the beginning that delay or hampers the efforts. "Run a Hackathon or an innovation boot camp, and the next big thing will materialize." Many companies went through this experience. It often resulted in the bittersweet feeling that although it was an excellent opportunity to motivate people, next Monday would simply be business as usual. No new products in the company’s pipeline. 

I had unique learnings in the journey scaling lean innovation practices in the enterprise. As each company's culture is unique, not everything will apply to your particular environment. Nevertheless, I hope you'll find value to increase chances of success in your initiatives. 

The beginning: The Lean Startup

Cisco is a powerhouse of innovation, and the golden standard many companies use to benchmark their own innovation efforts in the high-tech industry. It is all there, especially if you are part of the core engineering teams developing amazing new products and services. However, it is increasingly complicated for everyone else to break through the layers of such a big organization and give new ideas a chance.

Many colleagues expressed their frustration, as no one knew how to “distinguish good ideas from bad ones.” Even when the doors were open, few dared to push for their dream ideas: none looked like a $1B opportunity, so why trying?. This was the first cognitive bias we encountered, and one we had to deal with in the early stages of our journey.

In Jan 2015, as part of a Leadership Pipeline program targeting top 2% talent in Cisco, we brainstormed along with 200 people to see what we could do to create a positive impact the company if we were given $1M. “Any project, you name it”. Several ideas later and through a vetting process, the winner idea was “Reignite entrepreneurial spirit”. 

Oseas got in contact with Steve Liguori from Liguori and Associates. Steve had gone through a comparable challenge during his tenure at GE. The rationale was: if GE can do it, we can do it, given the scale and similar organizational complexities. Right after Oseas invited Leadership participants to join him. Andrew and I quickly joined and StartupCisco was born.

Since the three of us had startup experience, and following on Steve Liguori steps, we saw a fantastic opportunity to kickstart this effort where almost every startup has begun in the last few years: The Lean Startup. 

We made two critical decisions: we would run as a startup, and we would do it with no corporate mandate. We would be a grassroots movement, operating lean and out of the radar until we could show any real, tangible evidence of success.

Forging our startup culture

Everyone had a day job. This was a stretch, choice-based assignment. Devoting all these hours to the project involved a tremendous effort, but it was worth it in order to do what we loved. That is how we outlined our exit strategy: in 18-24 months we would be internally acquired, and this would become our day job. Steve Liguori said: "Be comfortable being uncomfortable".

We spent the next two months fine-tuning our approach of what Lean Startup would mean to us. We had a couple of amazing meeting with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, author of Innovation as Usual. He shared with us his research proving how companies can embrace real and organic innovation only when it becomes part of the everyday culture, as opposed to an innovation business unit or team. 

Our first hypothesis: if we can find a way to adopt Lean Startup to simplify how people develop their ideas, they will adopt Lean behaviors and organic innovation will accelerate. We ran a couple of workshops with volunteers interested in learning more about this. Also collected and measured participants’ feedback, interviewed more and made more adjustments to the dynamics. 

At this point, we had Partners from different areas of the business beginning to believe in our vision and joined us (Sharon Wong, Donald Graham, Rick Tywoniack, Biren Gandhi, etc)

If we can find a way to adopt Lean Startup to simplify how people develop their ideas, they will adopt Lean behaviors and organic innovation will accelerate

Key validated learnings so far: 

1. Good news: People want to and will innovate in the right environmental conditions. We had to leave people out of the first workshops. Word of mouth ran and we had more applicants than we could accommodate. At the end of the third month, we had over 50 people on the waiting list. 
2. Bad news: In the first two workshops we were teaching people lean principles, including lots of exercises. Boring. People would learn new skills, but we were not fundamentally changing how we behave. As said, “just equipping people with new skills will not make them better at innovating in a lean way”. 

We had our first pivot ahead of us. I will continue elaborating in the next post. But as an advance, this is what we decided: we would operate as a makers community. No teaching, no powerpoints from now on. And we would be accepting applications from people with actual problems to solve, no matter how early or developed the associated solutions were. This was our first break. Everything changed after this. 

In the next post, you will continue reading about our decisions, pivots, and learnings. Hope you find it interesting!

Ed Ceballos - Twitter: @EdCeballos