Cisco Fosters Innovation, Product Development through Strong Relations with the Research Community

April 12, 2006

By Jenny Carless, News@Cisco

Recognizing the importance of innovation to its success, Cisco Systems takes advantage of every opportunity to capture broad perspective and analysis of potentially relevant technologies and ideas. The company adopts a multi-pronged approach, both nurturing innovation internally and developing mutually beneficial relationships with the research community.

The Cisco Technology Center is an innovation hub that proactively initiates and encourages commercial development of new strategic technologies and unexploited markets. The center and the Cisco Academic Research and Technology Initiatives group (ARTI) work together to take advantage of academic research investments to provide a broad set of sources and practices to fuel innovation.

"One of the tools in our toolbox is the ability to take advantage of external research as part of our overall internal innovation process," explains Dave Rossetti, vice president of Strategic Software Technology and director of the Technology Center. "In creating new markets and incubating new technologies for Cisco, there is a wealth of information and work done in the research community that can accelerate our activities and help us determine which efforts should be key focus areas."

External associations generally fall into three categories:

• Long-term research (e.g., grants to universities on topics of interest to Cisco and industry)
• Shorter-term engagements that build upon the initial long-term work
• Relationships with 'fraternal' research organizations, to gain access to the thinking and innovation that occur there

Seeds of Innovation

Cisco created ARTI to help foster longer-term research goals. One of the group's key tools in this effort is the University Research Program (URP), which encourages, through unrestricted grants, investigation of problems in network-related technologies that will be of topical interest to Cisco and industry five to 10 years down the road.

"This spreads a problem out, letting us focus more minds on it," says Graham Holmes, senior manager, URP. "By funding these endeavors, we're creating seeds of ideas that we expect to bear fruit in a few years."

To date, Cisco has awarded 200+ grants at more than 100 universities worldwide.

Accelerating Development

"The second type of engagement is about accelerating development - taking an idea that has been validated by the long-term research and trying to turn it into a product," explains Holmes. "In this case, Cisco often works with a university or other research group to define a specific problem, study relevant research and work going on at Cisco, and then develop a plan to take the idea and turn it into a product."

Research topics that Cisco has funded over time include routing protocols, wireless protocols, ad-hoc networks, security, network management, storage networking, distributed computing and grid computing, among many others

An example of leveraging academic research for internal innovation was the award of a grant to investigate Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) management and routing protocol-related issues. In one instance, Cisco funded a number of European universities and related research networks to collaborate on procedures and methods for managing the process of renumbering IPv6 networks. As a result of this work, Cisco funded a specific proposal from the University of Henri to take a particular management concept and methods and develop a set of tools that could be used in future IPv6 management-related products.

"Cisco has funded that research, and the work they're doing is now feeding back into our Network Management Technology Group as that business unit looks at the tool sets we need to manage IPv6 networks," explains Holmes.

"So here you have a real product life cycle," he points out. "The idea started externally; we funded it, which helped the research to continue; and then ultimately it came back to Cisco as a short-term applied product opportunity."

Gaining Perspective

A third type of relationship involves membership in 'fraternal' type research organizations such as the Santa Fe Institute and the MIT Media Lab.

"These international think tanks typically look at very large-scale systems, and often someone will then translate that research into how it might apply to the Internet, for example," explains Christian Renaud, manager, Business Development for the Technology Center.

As an illustration, Cisco recently hosted a joint University of California Davis/Santa Fe Institute workshop on large-system dynamics. There, one hundred leading thinkers discussed large-scale radio astronomy, climatology and seismology and how those relate to data communications.

"These are the big-picture problems we'll need to solve as we move to the next generation of the Internet," Renaud adds. "So through our association with these groups, we can gain important perspective."

Cisco has also enjoyed a strategic relationship with the MIT Media Lab for some time. "That relationship provides us with a window into the rapidly developing world of digital technology and enables us to gain increased visibility into emerging technology and market trends," says Charles Giancarlo, chief technology officer.

Wide-Ranging Benefits

This multi-pronged approach to research represents a symbiotic relationship for fostering innovation.

"These interactions between industry and academia become conduits of information flow," Holmes points out. "So from academia we get ideas about longer-term issues - ideas that, in our rush to get products out the door, we might not have time to consider fully."

Universities also benefit. "There is less government investment in information technology (IT) research lately, and this is a way to help encourage academics to think about problems that are relevant to us and the industry," he adds. "Further, it helps us encourage students to enter careers in IT networking, by providing funding that allows researchers to hire high-caliber graduate students."

Ultimately, of course, Cisco customers are among the biggest beneficiaries, because the company is able to develop better innovations, faster.

"The danger in innovation is that you can drown in all the potential ideas," says Renaud. "And there will always be more of those than there are people to take them to fruition."

Faced with that nebulous mass of ideas, the research community serves as a filter to help weed out high- versus low-viability technology and opportunities. Through its ongoing involvement with external research groups, Cisco will continue to foster the critical innovation in new strategic technologies and unexploited markets that has characterized its success to date.

Jenny Carless is a freelance writer located in Santa Cruz, CA.