Become an Enterprise Innovator: CiscoStartup

tmero · ‎06-23-2016

What is CiscoStartUp?

When I first joined this training session, I first thought I’d be working with different Startup companies solving problems and forming new ideas. I was close, but this wasn’t it. Another person asked me if CiscoStartup is where they help out other startup companies or if this is where we train startup companies.

To learn how to innovate like a startup or to simply embed a fast-paced, evidence-based decision-making culture in our company, this is where StartupCisco comes in place It was created as a grassroots movement to accelerate Cisco’s entrepreneurial innovation - like a startup, where we focus heavily on Lean Startup and Design Thinking with a bias toward action versus academic admiration and discussion.

StartupCisco is a new program that we launched internally, held in our California or North Carolina office. This is a 3-day training session to give an opportunity to Cisco employees to learn and break down and solve problems quickly in a startup Mentality. Learn to work in a multi disciplinary team.

In order to help us get outside perspective on the greater issue, we had ongoing meetings to get insights from different stakeholders with international partners, instructors, internal executives, and from role models throughout the training sessions.

We spent 3 days with intensive training on how to create a startup company starting from solving a problem. Each team has a professional startup visionary and a startup coach to help us through the process. After the 3 days, we will continue meetings for 8 weeks online to build out the basic concepts of the company. After this, we will be pitching our idea and requesting round 1 funding.

What is Our Grand Idea?

Haha I’m not telling you yet. ;-)

But I will explain how we got to our final conclusion of the startup idea by going through the workflow of gathering information.

What Happened Here on June 14, 2016

Each person involved at StartupCisco is preselected to form these teams to solve a specific problem. There were about 7 teams with about 5-7 people in it. Each team was given a real issue we have at Cisco, where the solution can also help the world at a greater scale.

The problem that we received was: “Increase female participation from 20% to 40% in NetAcad”. NetAcademy is a non-profit organization under Cisco that allows people to get an education in Network Engineering at no cost. Currently there are 1 million students. Well, we didn’t have to solve this specific problem, as you build off on an idea, you tend to work on solving a greater problem that can solve your smaller solution, even if it is a longer term solution.

Our final issue we decided to solve was, “How can we build a pipeline and foundation to increase female participation in IT”? That is the basics of it, but it gets even more specific as we started building out the idea of the product/service towards the end. :-)

How Can This Help Your Business?

Using Startup Methodologies and Processes can really help your business with solutions to problems or even possibly help spark up a new idea and executing on creating innovation for your business. With technology constantly changing and demand for better technology increasing over time, so does your business.

The Idea Processes

Cisco loves to share and teach others how to better themselves. We are sharing this blog post to increase awareness of how to problem solve and the things Cisco is doing internally.

These idea processes are a summary, but not to the specific, of the workshop materials that were provided in the startup training. I am sharing not only a summary, but combining it with the work that my startup project team created.

Experimentation

By combining the scientific method provided by The Lean Startup* with Service Design prototyping tools and methods, the team can combine user insights about the relevance of the ideas

Interviews

As mentioned before, our project team had in depth interviews with stakeholders, partners, internal company executives, instructors and teachers, and model users for our proposed product. As defined by The Lean Startup, we call them the “Hero’s” where each hero is the type of person(s) that would be working with our business.

Service Principles

This is what drives the behind the scenes of what our hypothesis is. It is the creation of the reasons and the “why’s” of why we are doing this. When you focus on the reasons for creating your product or service, it helps you stay focused on what is only important to your business needs. When your ideas start branches out away from the main focus point, bring back a white board of your idea pinciples and it will help steer your team back towards the right direction.

I do believe it is a lot of fun when you have your team flowing with burning ideas, and a pile of colored sticky notes and a very specific process to organize these thoughts.

Idea Creation (My favorite part)

We each spent 1 minute pitching our idea, and then 10 minutes explaining our concept with questions and feedback from other team members. Each person on my team was very open minded and respectful to one another. We realized each one of us had an entirely different product idea, but it all solved one single problem. We managed to work together for several hours on making our ideas combine into a greater idea. After much debate and compromising, we came up with a master plan. With much excitement, we ran to the drawing board and was able to create these ideas from beginning to end, with even a plan for version 2 of our product! I can’t even tell you how much excitement I felt during this process out of the whole workshop.

More Meetings

We continued to have more meetings with stakeholders to discuss these issues in more depth. Every single person we interviewed (with quiz questions we came up with that fit the answers we were looking for), more ideas sprouted. This made me value the importance of talking to users and listening to their input. To top things off, not only did we do countless worthwhile video calls, we also had in person face-to-face meetings with our models.

So, after every process that our team went through to create a startup plan, our mission statement was growing and being refined after each day. This is our final mission that helped us determine what direction to go with the product:

Building a pipeline foundation of IT by means of the younger generation by providing tools and education for middle school aged students (9-13) targeting females to drive interest and build confidence by the time they reach high school in the US.

We have a very intense idea that will create the future of women in tech, without excluding men, which reaches our end goal to bring more women into NetAcademy.

The “WOW” Factor

We spent some time ont he drawing board on what users of our products would say and what would get them excited with using the product. We made sure it was very detailed and made it a product that we have no single doubt that will become a success.

Stick With Your Vision

It is easy to navigate away from your original idea when there is so many ideas coming in. Stay focused on your vision and work on what is feasible for your team and startup to make a product at low cost, being able to demonstrate success at a faster rate.

The Importance of Partnerships

Why Partners? Partners are companies or people who believe in your idea and support you every step of the way, whether it’s by providing funds, products, or services that will help you build out your idea. We are very lucky to have a couple people on the team who are professionals in the Startup scene and have built many connections with other enterprise companies. By Day 3, we had a company interested in partnering with my team. By the time I was about to leave, I was contacted by another person who loved our idea so much they wanted to also support and be a partner in our company.

Women in Tech with Cisco!

Cisco takes diversity and gender equality as an important factor, as we have a well diversified company, which is only getting better over time. We have a community called DevNet Women, which is an inclusive community of women who inspire, encourage, educate, mentor, and support each other. DevNet is the developer department of Cisco. It feels more like a large startup community where we all collaborate and have fun while doing it. With DevNet Women, we frequently have workshops and sessions, which our next event will be at Cisco Live US in July 2016 where you can find our DevNet women community. A lot of these ideas I was able to share came from a previous workshop I attended with DevNet women. :-)

More Tips on Initial Steps

Create an idea that solves a problem
Don’t go towards too many directions with your ideas and try to focus and start small, or else your ideas will go all over the place and you will struggle to prove concepts early on
Don’t get stuck on one single idea and be open to collaborating with other people’s ideas, or possibly the ideas from others
Be open to constructive criticism as it can help with your startup ideas
Have a purpose with your idea and see things in all other angles, such as your users angles
If one person thinks your idea is not good, don’t give up based on a single feedback. Keep pushing and do what you believe in
Make sure you are building a product or service that serves the customers and don’t focus on things that will serve everything else (ie: A website where you spend too much time on the admin processes, rather than the user experience)
You better be passionate about your idea. Investors want to invest in people who really believe in their product/service and are passionate about the idea

Have an Idea?

Book Recommendation

One of the organizers of this event is an author of the book, “The Service Startup”, by Tenner Pinheiro. ISBN 978-0-615-92978-1. Highly recommended read from someone who is very experienced with creating successful startups.