Cisco I-Prize Announces its Winner and a Successful Global Collaboration

October 19, 2008 at 9:25 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I wrote about the Cisco I-Prize a few months ago – see Mining the Web and the World for Innovation a while back. This week they 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. 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 App Gap 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.

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Dueling philosophies: social media vs. knowledge management

October 17, 2008 at 2:44 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, KM, Social Media

Venkat Rao of Xerox recently introduced an important argument about the underlying differences between social media and knowledge management approaches inside the Enterprise. Here’s the way I described them at delicious. Both are worth a look, a read, and some thought.

Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War – An interesting and thought provoking post on some major philosophical differences between the world of knowledge management and social media. While I think the effort to link these differences to generational differences (Boomers vs. Millenials) is a bit of a stretch, the contrasts in philosophy and approach themselves are quite telling.

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: The Reactions – This is a follow up to an earlier discussion of the differences between knowledge management and social media in the enterprise. It collects various responses and reactions and goes on to react to the reactions. Definitely well worth reading.

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Tact, efficiency define a balanced approach

October 15, 2008 at 8:19 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In my first post here in the FastForwardBlog, I offered some tips on getting started down the path of Enterprise 2.0 in your organization. With the current economic situation still casting a shadow, I believe the advice is more important than ever.

Bringing social computing in to your organization in the near term will require measured amounts of tact and enthusiasm. You will need to set a pace that others can maintain, but you must be sure to maintain that pace even through the current climate.

From that post:

Some tips:

• Look inside: Chances are you have at least a few clued-in people. Take them to lunch and and give them some space to share their ideas. If they are really on to something, try to free up some of their workday so that they can experiment
• Listen carefully: There are two conversations going on right now, one about Technology, and one about a Business Ideology. If technology isn’t your thing, then start moving forward with new business ideas and the right technology will emerge, and if you are pegged as a technology person then start opening up the world of low cost options to your colleagues.
• Don’t rush: Major shifts in corporate structure and direction are painful and drawn out exercises. Instead of feeling the need to act, focus instead on assimilating relevant new ideas and contextualizing them around your own strategy.
• Act fast: Low cost and low friction opportunities are now available to everyone, learn to try small. If a transformation is going to take place successfully in your organization, it will be through thousands of small efforts, not one large push.
• Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust.
• Learn to imagine again: For the first time in almost 70 years business is truly changing, and the possibilities are endless. What does that mean for you?
• You are creating this too: This isn’t about converting to a new ideology, this isn’t even about accepting a new idea, we are early enough in the new world of the New Enterprise that each participant is a creator. There are no masters yet, no old guard or new revolutionaries, there is simply an idea out there that is really starting to take hold, and every disciple is must do double time as a prophet.
• Learn to be ready: Only when you fully realize the potential for your organization can you find the right help. The best and smartest people will not be coming to you, you will have to find them. There is a boom of sorts coming in Enterprise 2.0, so be wary of snake-oil salesmen and instead go out and learn from the gurus and masters who will continue to emerge in the next year and beyond.
• Keep reading: The amount of knowledge, understanding and ideas that are being shared is staggering. Never before in business have so many innovations and creations been available for free. So start reading every relevant blog, article and book you can find, and don’t stop: the ideas will not stop evolving.

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What He Said

October 14, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0

Frankly I couldn’t have said it any better than Leo Babauta, in his piece Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game. Indeed, he’s said a lot of relevant things I’ve wanted to say, but just haven’t gotten around to.

To put it all in context he compares two perspectives — Old School vs. Productivity 2.0 — across the following dimensions:

Crank It Out vs Deep Focus
Lots of Planning vs Just Start
Tons of Paperwork vs Automate
Multi-Tasking is Productive vs Multi-Project and Single-Task
Produce More vs Produce Less
Be Organized vs Tag, Archive and Search
Hierarchy vs Independence, Freedom and Collaboration
Work Longer Hours vs Work Fewer Hours

This all reinforces fundamental 2.0 thinking.
Way to go, Leo.

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Are Enterprise 2.0 Applications Prices Going to Fall? What About Market Size?

October 14, 2008 at 9:01 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I recently wrote on this blog on why the enterprise 2.0 market might continue to grow in a down market, see Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media – Will It Continue? My blog colleague Jevon MacDonald covered the concept in more depth in his post, In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. I really like the series of points Jevon made. He concludes with this statement, “In a time of uncertainty such as we have seen in the past several months, new and promising technologies may prove to be the safest harbour for those who must continue to deliver growth.”

Forrester is leader in promoting the enterprise 2.0 market. More recently, Oliver Young provided a new report with some cautions, Vendors: Prepare For Falling Prices For Enterprise Web 2.0 Collaboration And Productivity Apps. It was likely written before the recent market downturn. The summary states, “The enterprise Web 2.0 market is experiencing an explosion of activity among enterprises seeking collaboration and productivity improvements. While that explosion is placing Web 2.0 technology in the hands of millions of knowledge workers, cutthroat competition, commoditization, bundling, and subsumption are all offsetting the associated license revenue growth. How bad will it get? Forrester expects that most Web 2.0 tools will experience falling average deal sizes over the next five years, with some deal sizes dropping by more than half. Product managers must take steps today to manage increasingly competitive times ahead.”

Part of this prediction is the normal evolution of new software markets. Oliver points out that in many cases the tools have moved into a period of refinement rather than breakthrough innovation. This may be largely true but I still see some new genres or expansions on existing ones as I interview application suppliers for the AppGap blog.

His next major point is that bundling creates a more homogenous set of competitors. Here I completely agree. Many of the best of breed providers are moving away from their initial starting point (e.g., blog, wiki, social networking, etc.) to providing more a consolidated suite or platform. The newest entries such as smaller players like Qtask and big guys like CiscoWebEx are talking about integrated platforms. Others like Attivio are combining capabilities (business intelligence and enterprise search in their case). Even Microsoft, which announced a number of integration capabilities with best of breed vendors, is moving to adding a lot of those capabilities into Sharepoint – see upcoming Sharepoint investment areas.

Oliver then talks about subsumption (a word surprisingly not liked in the Microsoft spell checker) which is an extension of bundling. He writes, “Microsoft and SAP, are rolling Web 2.0 features into existing software packages; in many cases, they are providing the technology at no extra cost. Microsoft, for example, bundles lightweight blogging and wiki tools into SharePoint.” My recent experiences with Sharepoint implementers supports this idea.

Getting down to details, Oliver predicts the price for blogs and wikis will fall the most. They were part of the original selection of web 2.0 tools so this makes sense, especially as other tools have picked up some of their breakthrough functions like project management. He says that social networking will follow blogs and wikis and become commoditized with Sharepoint being a major reason. On the brighter side, Oliver predicts that mashups will continue to grow in maturity and use. Once again I agree with Oliver as mashups become more of the underlying plumbing in enterprise 2.0 tools like Deki for CRM. Mashup providers like Serena should do well as they refine their offering and firms like Nexaweb that use mashups for deep enterprise application integrations should also do well.

There is much more and I recommend the report. I wonder how these trends that support some falling process might intersect with the potential for increased demand that Jevon mentions and I referenced in the opening paragraph of this post.

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