Two Cisco technology executives discuss what it takes to foster an innovative environment. Their thoughts are revealing to small and midsize businesses as well as large enterprises
What is technology incubation? How can businesses successfully innovate internally? What are some of the barriers to innovation, and can businesses overcome them? These are some of the questions addressed by Dave Rossetti, vice president of Technology and Market Development at Cisco, and Greg Pelton, senior director of Cisco's Technology Center, which focuses on technology incubation. Ewan Morrison, Editor, Cisco Executive Thought Leadership posed the questions.
Q: What do we mean when we talk about "technology incubation"?
Rossetti: First of all, I would like to draw a distinction between innovation and invention. Invention is hard stuff, don't get me wrong, but I would say that after the invention there's a tremendous amount of hard work that's required to get a good idea all the way out to the street. And what we try to provide when we talk about technology incubation is an environment where you can fully develop and deliver on those good ideas.
Pelton: It's really about getting out ahead of the market. Understanding where the new opportunities are going to be and then doing the work to take those opportunities and qualify them and understand if they have real value and can really help drive the top line for the company. So you need to do enough work to understand if an idea is a good idea and if it's a relevant idea, and if it's an idea that can generate a reasonable amount of revenue so it then can be driven into the mainline business.
Q: What are some of the requirements that need to be present to foster an innovative environment?
Rossetti: I think it's really important to have a team that's 100-percent focused on what it's trying to accomplish with the innovation process.
Secondly, there's nothing that breeds succeeds like success, which is a way of saying that credibility is important. If you build credibility, people will actually trust you to come up with the good ideas and to follow through on what you said you were going to do.
Finally, it's important to have customers. Now what is a customer in a situation like we're discussing here? The customers that we have in our innovation groups here are actually other groups at Cisco. The output absolutely needs to be clients who want the stuff that we do and who are willing to pick it up when we're done with it.
Q: What are some of the challenges that companies face in attempting to innovate internally?
Rossetti: There's always a struggle between short-term goals and long-term goals. What we're talking about here in terms of innovation and incubation is a more patient process in which you have to focus more on your long-term goals. There's a natural resistance within any organization to doing things differently, so if you're really focused on the short term, doing things in a more long-term way is a challenge. I think you need to find talented, risktaking people who can actually think more in a long-term way and go against the grain of the short-term thinking that many organizations have.
Pelton: I think it's critical to balance business with technology. There are a lot of companies that are able to set aside a group of people and invest in technology incubation, but they don't add business process or business relevance to that.
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