The Games are the starting gun for race to transform British innovation
Cisco has a growth plan for the UK, and Neil Crockett reveals why the Olympics is the perfect catalyst
Q.What WAS YOUR BRAND’S PRIMARY REASON FOR BEING Involved with the games?
A.It’s the first time worldwide that Cisco’s ever been involved in anything like this as a sponsor. We’ve been a supplier: we supplied to the Beijing Games, we supplied to the World Cup in South Africa, but we’ve never been a sponsor, and there’s a big difference.
Obviously the Games is a global event, a huge stage. It gave us the chance to show that working with partners like BT and Atos we can deliver something totally mission-critical. What a great opportunity to show that you’re the best at what you do.
In relation to the brand, Cisco can sometimes be seen as the “plumbing of technology” company. Actually, we are so involved in the fabric at the heart of IT but we also help cities and countries and societies transform – we do this around the world. For the brand in the UK, too, quite often we’re perceived as an American company, a global company doing business in the UK. But we’ve got 4,000 people in the UK, a huge operation, and we’re all British. And what we really want to become is part of the UK, not just working in the UK. That brand transition is central to the agenda for Cisco, which is why our focus for 2012 is really around legacy, and not just what happens next October, but what happens for the next five years. We want to use the Olympics as a catalyst to be at the heart of that discussion, where we’re relevant, on stimulating high-tech innovation. It’s a chance for our UK brand to seem essential to a major agenda in the country, rather than a purveyor of technology.
Q.how did you structure the case for board approval?
A.It’s not an inexpensive thing to become an Olympic sponsor in lots of ways – not just in money cost, but also in resources. It does take up a lot of time of a lot of your best people and that’s opportunity cost as well as real cost, so it’s not to be entered into lightly. As well as the advantages to the brand, and showing our ability to work in an ecosystem way with the other Olympic partners, like BT, another key was employee engagement. It’s been quite amazing already. We talk about three things, pride, health and fun, as being the things that we’re trying to engender. So that opportunity to make people in the company feel really, really motivated was there as well. Finally, it is a global stage for our biggest customers and we will be building some major assets in London and we using them to position our company and explain why technology isn’t just the plumbing but has huge relevance as you look at what the future holds for business.
Q.What are the most crucial commercial opportunities in the Games for you?
A.Beyond doubt the legacy. We have a programme that we call internally Building a Brilliant Future that starts with the question, how do we help the UK over the next five years to get economic growth through a massive increase in innovation? It starts early, with the skills agenda in schools and the skills that are needed in the IT industry: science, technology, engineering and maths. We’ve just announced our major programme, Out of the Blocks. We worked with the Pearson Foundation to restructure the syllabus for 14-16 year-olds, producing booklets with Olympic examples. We’re giving that out to 4,000 schools and we’re going to run events and activities on the back of that to inspire kids.
We also have the Cisco Networking Academy Project, the largest e-learning classroom in the world. It’s had 4m students through since it started. We are going to triple the academies in east London. Over five years, that will bring 4,000-5,000 east London kids through, learning industry-recognised skills. Of the 22 per cent who get through to the final level, 91 per cent will get new jobs.
Our other initiative is the British Innovation Gateway, to help today’s wave of entrepreneurs over the next five years. We’re putting innovation centres in Shoreditch and the Olympic Park and, as the UK has brilliant centres of innovation but they tend to be little islands, we’ve creating the National Virtual Incubator: we’ll use our capabilities that give enhanced ways of collaborating and we’re partnering with Janet, the UK’s education and research network, so that innovation parks can link together and form a community, not just for Tech City but for the UK.
Finally, we’re going to run a series of open innovation prizes, called the Big Awards, to find innovation and bring it out with resources and mentoring.
We’re just part of a lot of people doing a lot of stuff, but we think if we use the platform we can help build up a new future for the UK. And we like the idea that we’re at the centre of that agenda.
This will be the biggest project like this we’ve done, but we’ve done several: in Korea, Barcelona, Toronto, Skolkovo in Russia. There’s lots of examples where Cisco gets involved and says: let’s work towards transforming the agenda in the country. We’re trying to bring that feature of what we do out in the brand.
Neil Crockett is the managing director of London 2012 for Cisco, the official network infrastructure provider to London 2012.