I have been covering the Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this initiative.  I spoke with Sharon Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their Global Collaboration).  So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco tools including the following four.

Cisco Show and Share, a social video community where contest participants can record, edit and share video; comment, rate and tag interesting content; and use speech-to-text translation for video search and viewing.

Cisco Pulse, a search platform that dynamically tags content as it crosses the network, allowing contest participants to accurately locate and connect with the best available experts and information on a particular topic.

Cisco WebEx™, an online meeting platform for audio and Web conferencing that enables users to share documents and desktops in real time.

Cisco TelePresence™, an immersive, virtual meeting experience that combines real-time video, audio and interactive technologies to give people in distributed global locations a wide variety of face-to-face collaboration experiences.

The program was divided into the following four categories:

The future of work: Use the power of the network to bring together customers, suppliers and associates to propose solutions that will change the way companies and organizations do business.

The connected life: Showcase technological advancements that will dramatically improve living conditions and culture. This category will require people to envision a life of seamless connectivity.

New ways to learn: Create innovative solutions that will transform when, where and how people learn.

The future of entertainment: Devise next-generation solutions that will change how people play.

The I-Prize event is targeted at those outside the organization as they already have programs to encourage contributions from employees. However, employees can participant in the various ways to comment on and rate the entries.  Cisco introduced an IP point system to this second contest to create an ideas market. The ideas market was build on the Spigit platform, a product I covered on this blog before. Participants received IP points when they registered. They could invest these points in ideas. There was a cap on the number of points you could invest in any one idea to prevent gaming the system. As strong ideas emerged, the investors’ points became more valuable. Participants also got more points for their participation in the process and they could invest these.

A leader board allowed people to track ideas and their points. You could also follow the point progress for people. This transparency increased involvement as I have seen in many situations. In the first contest there were 2,500 participants and 4,000 comments. In the second one there were 3,000 participants and almost 12,000, comments. Many participants said the leader board was very engaging and they followed it on a frequent basis.  I like this idea and it showed that Cisco listened to participants.

The event was organized in three phases. In the first phase, which lasted three months, the 3,000 people submitted over 800 ideas. These participants came from 156 countries. They could use video for submissions and commentary.  In the second phase the field was reduced to thirty-two teams from twenty two countries. Eight of these teams were picked through the IP point system, the top two in each of the four categories advancing. The Cisco team picked the other 24 idea teams.  A team of ten Cisco managers monitored the leader board process.

In the third phase nine finalist teams presented their ideas to Cisco using telepresence. These nine teams were composed of people from 14 countries on six continents.  The wining team received a $250,000 prize. Like all participants they retained the intellectual property rights and Cisco licensed their idea for an undisclosed sum.  The team was composed of five students from Mexico: Darius Lau Castro and his teammates Lizett Michel Gallegos, Claudia Alexandra Vargas Prieto, Guillermo Antonio Araiza Torres and Juan Rodrigo Huerta Manning. You can se the announcement of the winning team below with team members on the video screen.

They proposed an online “Life Account” to create a physical and virtual platform that facilitates connectivity along with smart objects, people and information. Life Account collects data about its users through devices that capture information both from the users’ activities in the physical and virtual world. This data is then aggregated to generate a virtual profile that understands habits and behavior patterns to conveniently blend the physical and virtual world for the user.

The winning idea from the first contest also came from students and it was directed at effective energy management.  The winning team contained two Germans and a Russian. It was 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 were looking at ways to use the network as the platform for visibility, manageability and, ultimately, optimized control of energy-consuming systems. It has now been folded into Cisco’s energy management offering.  Two of the finalists from the first contest made it to the finals in the second year.

I think this is a great example of crowd-sourcing with a clearly define process and the right supporting collaborative tools. It continues to improve. I look forward to seeing what changes they may make to the next competition.