Never before have we seen digitisation accelerate so quickly as the past few months. The current period has opened a window of opportunity to make changes and even transform our way of working, our processes and even our business models.
It is in this context that we organize the second edition of our Cisco Belux Innovation Challenge, now in full digital mode. Together with our partner Impact Valley, a local innovation agency, we will run our customer hackathon online, which is a first. No less than six teams from various customers will seek answers to concrete business challenges their organisations are facing today.
It’s all about people
Feedback from our customers shows decision-making is faster than before too, setting a new pace for innovation and the modernisation of operations and other business processes. We welcome this acceleration, but it is important to still weigh decisions properly and convert ideas in concrete optimizations for users. As always, it’s about people. You will develop better ideas with different profiles on board and it will also allow a faster solution integration across the organisation. Our hackathon experience has proven that diverse teams increase their chances for success and make the sought after innovation more sustainable.
According to us, customers need to involve their entire organization and nurture innovation to come with proposals matching the organization’s vision and capacity to execute. With design-thinking and collective intelligence techniques, our Cisco innovation coaches will help the teams to broaden their view and embark on a smart ideation journey.
This journey consists of 4 innovation phases to discover, design, define and ultimately develop a concrete solution. Our model makes it easier to integrate new technologies, unlock their capabilities and as such accelerate innovation to address a concrete business challenge they have selected.
Facilitate innovation through remote facilitation
Our team of innovation coaches has already gained experience in the field of remote ideation and remote facilitation with the Hack the Crisis online hackathons. We use online tools such as our collaboration software Cisco Webex Teams, the online collaborative whiteboarding platform Miro, the presentation software Mentimeter and the quiz platform Kahoot.
Driven by humour, passion and energy, we – and the teams we’ll be coaching – will build on that to co-create new and successful solutions that add value for our CiscoBIC 2020 participants and their organizations. Our environment is changing quickly and we have to adapt equally fast. The CiscoBIC collaborative challenge seeks to build on this change and move forward.
Online hackathon also requires time away from a screen
One of the biggest challenges for this fully digital edition though will be to manage our participants energy levels. No one can be productive staying 9 hours in a row in front of a screen and so for 3 consecutive days. This is the reason we have adapted the agenda to give more flexibility, breaks and time for self-reflection.
At the end of this ideation journey, each team will have an opportunity to pitch their solution in front of a multi-disciplinary jury … before pitching it within their organization in front of their board or strategic committee.
Good luck to Euroclear, SPW, Le Forem, Actiris & STIB-MIVB!
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