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“We needed an end-to-end solution. A platform with the capability to capture ideas, facilitate discussion and collaboration for good ideas to grow. Along with the ability to progress ideas through stage gates with tracking of decisions, through to moving the idea into a project for delivery,”
- Artem Ignatenko, Innovation Development Manager of Customer Experience Organization at Cisco.
A disconnected innovation pipeline
Made up of three key groups of stakeholders, each with their own innovation process, the Cisco team lacked a holistic view of their innovation efforts, often resulting in duplications and discrepancies.
With different solutions across the organization, the Cisco team also found the whole business case process difficult to standardize.
“We were struggling to embed a single approach, different and outdated templates would get used with varying assumptions, categories and methodologies for calculating benefits. We wanted to make a standard experience that could be utilized by everyone who wanted an idea to be scaled.” said Artem Ignatenko.
The Hunt for an end-to-end platform
Cisco already had an ideas management solution but, having decided they wanted something bigger than just the ideation phase, the organization explored a wide range of suppliers on the market.
Very few had a solution for idea delivery as well as idea creation. Cisco didn’t want the complexity of having yet another platform connected to their ideation platform and indeed found most existing project management tools too complex for their needs.
The Cisco team needed a tool that was…
- Transformational
- Supported the entire end-to-end process
- Easy to use
“edison365 provides the opportunity to engage across the organization, allowing us to look at the innovation portfolio holistically and gain different perspectives and angles; empowering insights and decision making,”
- Artem Ignatenko, Innovation Development Manager of Customer Experience Organization at Cisco.
Driving value under one umbrella with edison365
Ideas raised by technical engineers to streamline and automate processes, which would have formerly only been viewed by technologists, are now also being looked at from a professional services angle.
Working under one umbrella with the ability to engage different perspectives, the team are not only reducing time and cost to resolve customer issues, but they are also identifying ways to turn those ideas into something of monetary value and adding to the Cisco portfolio.
It is not just solving ongoing challenges that Cisco are focused on; Hackathons are also key to the ideation process with specific and time-based goals being created within edison365. By utilizing the triage capabilities, innovators gain quick feedback on ideas and can make improvements. Adding in gamification and the ability to vote and make nominations during hackathons is proving popular and driving adoption.
Want to know more about this implementation
The power of the platform
- edison365ideas introduces a centralized space to capture employee ideas and opens the door to new perspectives and collaboration.
- Business cases that were previously difficult to standardize are now easy to manage and customized to each team’s way of working, helping to crystallize a minimum viable product from scaling stage based on their own business objectives.
- With edison365projects, Cisco have an easy-to-use platform to execute these projects.
Moving Forward
With its intuitive design and simple deployment, Cisco are already seeing wider than envisaged adoption of the platform.
“With no barriers or limitations to entry, the only thing new departments need to decide is whether they want a separate instance or access under our umbrella.” concluded Artem Ignatenko.
As they continue to identify internal use cases for the tool, the modular design makes it easy for Cisco to provide the right tools to the right users.
About Cisco
Cisco helps seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the unconnected. An integral part of Cisco’s DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships, working together to identify its customers’ needs and providing solutions that fuel their success.
Cisco have preserved this keen focus on solving business challenges since its founding in 1984. Len Bosack and wife Sandy Lerner, both working for Stanford University, wanted to email each other from their respective offices, but technological shortcomings did not allow such communication.
A technology had to be invented to deal with disparate local area protocols, and as a result of solving their challenge, the multiprotocol router was born. Today, with more than 71,000 employees worldwide, this tradition of innovation continues with industry leading products and solutions.
