Ep. 197 - Alex Goryachev, Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers MD & Author of Fearless Innovation

Alex Goryachev is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of the new book Fearless Innovation. Alex and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder talk about a variety of innovation initiatives going on at Cisco. We talk about the power of the individual innovator to drive corporate change and the many benefits of creating a strong ecosystem of partners outside your organization. 

Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that we recorded a number of interviews before the Corona virus disruption started. Wanted to give some context before we jump into some of these shows. Thank you very much for listening. Being part of the Inside Outside innovation community.  We look forward to talking more about the disruption of the Corona virus and other things. Stay safe, be well. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, I have another amazing guest. Today we have Alex Goryachev. Alex is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of a new book called Fearless Innovation: Going beyond the buzzword to continuously drive growth, improve your bottom line, and enact change. Welcome Alex to the show. 

Alex Goryachev: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about being here today. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Cisco's one of those companies that you hear over and over again about the types of things that they're doing when it comes to innovation. Let's talk a little bit about what's your role at Cisco and what are some of the amazing things that you're doing when it comes to the world of innovation? 

Alex Goryachev: When I think about Cisco, you are absolutely right. There's a reason why we are world's best workplace. To me, it comes down to the fact that we have so many innovators in the company. I'm a bit of a matchmaker, I think internally, trying to ensure that our innovators know each other and they're able to connect them, bring their ideas to life. We do have about 74,000 employees in the company, and I would say, each one of them is an innovator. And when we connect, the magic happens. So that's on the employee side. And then connecting to the outside world is another priority of mine. And we have a number of co-innovation centers around the world. Getting our employees and our teams plugged in and working together with universities and other ecosystem partners is another part of my role. 

Brian Ardinger:  Let's talk a little bit about what Cisco's co-innovation center is. We hear a lot about hackathons. We hear a lot about corporations that are trying to do startup corporate matchmaking and that, what makes your program different? And tell us a little bit about the co-innovation centers. 

Alex Goryachev: When we think about going innovation centers, they exist in different parts of the world. For example, we have centers in Tokyo, we have them in Australia, we have them in London. When we think about that flavor, that flavor changes depending on the geography. Because what we do well in one country is not necessarily what the need is in another one.  I think what's really important and what is the common thing is our ability to listen to our ecosystem and then figuring out joint solutions. And when I say solutions, I use the term broadly, right. It could be a joint research with the university, could be an internship program, could be a way for us to partner with a local startup, but it's all about let's stay connected with others and let's move the technology or business models forward by working together. We'll look at this as a win-win for everyone who is participating. 

Brian Ardinger: Was there a standard way to engage with these partners? Do you have particular quarterly or monthly get togethers, how do you go about finding the right partners and then working with them. 

Alex Goryachev: That's an exceptional question. And again, it all depends where we are locally. For example, in Australia, we are right on the university campus. We are right in the middle of innovation, and we're right in the middle of staying connected with a lot of the startups that come from university or students themselves. Right. And then in many other countries, we've been a very active player in the local startup ecosystem for many years. We obviously know our solution partners as well. We tend to be the partner of choice for them to connect with. The one interesting fact, we do encourage our employees to volunteer and gets engaged with the ecosystem as well. Some of those connections, they just happen organically and that's what the magic of it is.

Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that part about it. I've read a lot about yourself and what you do at Cisco and that, and I think we have the same feeling that corporate innovation is great, but at the end of the day, it's about individuals that are innovators within that organization that really make it or break it.  What are you seeing when it comes to what makes a great innovator within a company to actually drive change and innovation?

Alex Goryachev: I think it's someone who wants to win together, because at the end of the day is the lonely innovator is a myth, right.  When we think about companies, especially large companies, there's just so much knowledge in the organization and obviously there are great opportunities for scale, but what often happens is people are just not connected, and it's not because they don't want to, but because there's so many things to do. Look, the larger organizations tend to be siloed just simply because they're large. When people look at a cut across functional approach, when they want to win together and get others on board, I think that's when magic happens. If I think about innovation leader and people that are really making a difference, they're the people that are out there connecting their teams with other teams across the company and seeing what the win could be.

Brian Ardinger: From a practical perspective, it probably it didn't start out that way where you're thinking from a perspective that everybody within Cisco's an innovator. What are some of the grassroots things that you did to start that ball rolling or get people engaged in this process? 

Alex Goryachev: It did start that way in terms of...there are tons of good innovation programs around Cisco, but what happened is they were typically very much function based. Their work was programs for engineering or IT or other functions, but they typically focus on the scope of the organization, as well as what should happen. Then what we did is we took a very cross functional approach. It happened organically because for a number of years I've been running startup competitions for Cisco and the way we go and engage with the outside world, and every year there would be employee or two ...