SPIGIT IS THE INNNOVATION ENGINE THAT DRIVES BUSINESS GROWTH CASE STUDY1-925-297-2600 info@spigit.com www.spigit.com

Company ProfileFounded in 1984, Cisco Systems was created by a couple working at the prestigious Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay Area. Leonard Bosack was the manager of the Computer Science department’s laboratory; his wife, Sandra Lerner, oversaw the computers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Bosack devised a way to connect the LANs in the two departments where he and his wife worked, 500 yards apart. Unable to sell this new internetworking technology, the couple started their own business and called it Cisco Systems. The company name, a shortened form of San Francisco, was conceived as the couple drove across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today, Cisco reigns as a leader in the networking equipment industry, transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate. While this success is impressive, perhaps even more impressive is Cisco’s unique focus on corporate social responsibility.

The ChallengeCisco was eager to raise awareness of their role as an innovation leader and their active, growing partnership with governments and global communities. At the same time, the UK government under new Prime Minister, David Cameron, wanted to partner with a number of initiatives to encourage the growth of the UK economy in the small and medium enterprise sector and help drive and accelerate innovation activity. Concurrently, Cisco UK was bidding to be a network infrastructure provider to the London 2012 games.

“We were fortunate because of the convergence of all those things coming together at the same time. As a result, in August of 2009, Cisco was successful in becoming an Olympic supporter. We were clear on our initial thoughts of what our legacy from 2012 should be; we wanted to have a meaningful impact attaching Cisco to the UK in a big way, making the focus on innovation, skills and learning,” explained Tom Kneen, Head of Business Development.

To add to the excitement around the Olympics, the Cisco-led British Innovation Gateway program, also known as BIG, endorsed by the UK government, was created to support, recognize and reward excellence in innovation for small businesses. The main goal was to help accelerate the growth of high-tech businesses—from startups to SMEs. This was accomplished through contact and collaboration with other like-minded businesses, BIG partners, advisors and investors, as well as direct support from Cisco.

ENABLING A “BIG” LEGACY OF INNOVATION The ImplementationSpigit’s BIG involvement began in the summer of 2011. “It was important that the Spigit services team came in at the earliest possible stage; having them involved early brought the experiences and good creative ideas that Spigit shared as much as it brought our team together. By positioning the Spigit innovation platform at the center of the competition, we wanted to ensure that the design of the competition and how the platform would work went hand-in-hand. We also wanted to make sure we weren’t limiting the competition because of the platform and we weren’t restricting what the platform could do because of the nature of the competition,” explained Kneen.

“We wanted to make sure we thought about the needs and requirements of the startups, themselves, and ensure that we got

a genuine community feel surrounding the competition because the BIG Awards were just one component of BIG; there were other very important aspects, and we wanted the community to understand the full range of what was possible. Spigit’s workshops taught us how to successfully draw the community into the competition and how to leverage that community throughout the competition,” continued Kneen.

Working closely with Cisco, Spigit designed an open innovation platform to include all the integral features. “There were open and creative sessions between Cisco and Spigit over a period of months whilst we designed what the competition would be about and how it would be represented on the site. It took a period of time because it was the first time we did this in the UK; we wanted to get it right and make sure the Spigit team completely

whilst we used the Spigit platform in an external way, the center of things, the whole competition, has really caught the imagination of Cisco employees who were involved.”

“One of the main reasons we became an official supporter of the London 2012 Olympics was to leave a sustainable legacy for UK-based technology innovation. That has a major part to play in helping the UK to recover from our current economic challenges. There is explicit commitment to quickly extend the initiative far and wide across the UK, with the creation of locations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.”

To ensure that the platform is performing and hitting all of their objectives, Spigit built in game mechanics, advanced engagement and workflow management, and provided innovation strategy consulting. Cisco is looking to sponsor yearly competitions aimed at encouraging innovation in small businesses.

About CiscoCisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at www.cisco.co.uk

The British Innovation Gateway (BIG) is a Cisco-led, UK-wide program that supports technology startups and the upcoming generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. For more information about BIG please visit our website www.ciscobig.co.uk

understood what we were about and what we were trying to achieve,” said Kneen.

For example, Cisco wanted to allow everyone to see the headlines of all the ideas, which is atypical for an external open innovation competition. In addition, Cisco wanted registered users to be able to vote on the submitted ideas. Working with Spigit, Cisco decided that the users’ favorite idea would carry through to the end of the competition and would ultimately become one of six finalists. All this was accomplished using the gaming and virtual market functionality within the Spigit platform— called the idea market.

“The actual BIG Program was formally announced in January 2011 when John Chambers, Cisco’s Chairman and CEO, met with the Prime Minister. At that time, Cisco revealed that it would award an ‘iPrize’ to the winner of the BIG Awards, and it would launch the National Virtual Incubator (NVI), a place for young entrepreneurs, potential investors, designers, academics, and researchers to network and collaborate with one another. Two months were spent collecting ideas and getting start-ups to look at the website and enter the competition. During that time, hundreds of different start-ups submitted ideas across five categories: Internet of Things, Big Data, Future Cities, Mobility and Collaboration,” said Kneen.

OutcomeThe BIG Awards were a huge success, uncovering some of the UK’s most innovative start-ups and SMEs. After whittling down more than 300 entries to 20 semi-finalists, and letting six finalists battle it out in an exciting ‘Dragons Den’ style live pitch, Cisco’s first-ever BIG Awards winner was announced—SnapFashion, “the visual search engine for fashion” which combined the world of fashion with technology using a powerful search engine to find equivalent items of clothing.

Cisco wanted to put the spotlight on innovation and talent through the awards. The prize was awarded based on the originality and potential of the idea as well as the quality of the live pitch. Kneen summarized the experience by saying, “Not only were we very pleased to discover things we didn’t know through building and executing the competition and working with Spigit, but additionally the quality that came out the other end was quite staggering and we were quite amazed. It’s been a truly eye-opening experience and very motivational for our own staff. So

About SpigitSpigit’s Enterprise Innovation Platform is used by the world’s leading brands to invent new products and services, reduce costs and increase employee and customer engagement. Leveraging crowdsourcing, purpose driven social collaboration, game mechanics and big data analytics, Spigit helps companies identify and execute transformative ideas from their employees and customers at scale to drive business outcomes.

Over 3000 companies, including leading brands across Retail, Healthcare, Financial, Technology, Government, Insurance, Utilities and Pharmaceutical industries use Spigit to make innovation a mission critical, repeatable, predictable and quantifiable business process.

1-925-297-2600info@spigit.comwww.spigit.com