Cisco is delighted to be a Technology Partner for the first Disruptive Innovation Festival (DIF) because disruption and innovation have been in our heart blood from the the outset. We are also pleased to be a Global Partner to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which formed in September 2010 and who are launching the DIF as a way to spark innovation and entrepreneurship around the circular economy. Global emerging trends are paving the way for a new form of economic development, and the circular economy framework helps us rethink the future. It is a catalyst for disruptive innovation in the way we design, manufacture, consume and recycle products and technology.
This year Cisco celebrates 30 years since we were founded by 2 people back in Stanford in 1984 who were very much the original disruptors in tech in the early days of the internet and the founding of the network router that powers our internet today. To maintain its market leadership position Cisco has consistently predicted, led and driven market transitions or disruptions in areas of technology such as data switching, voice/data integration, voice over IP, IP telephony, video and collaboration, data centre consolidation and virtualisation and most recently InterCloud.
At each stage the market transition has involved the convergence of technologies onto IP and the Internet with the subsequent cost and operational advantages of managing more integrated and agile infrastructure and the foundation of a new and better way to do something that overtime becomes the standard.
The strategy has always involved Cisco seeking to either develop, acquire (we have made more than 165 acquisitions to date – read more) or partner with organisations that can complement and broaden the existing technology areas that we operate in and are focused on.
The most recent of these market transitions is the emergence of the Internet Of Things (IoT) or Internet Of Everything (IoE) as Cisco describes the broader opportunity. In this area it is widely predicted that there will be some 50B things connected to the internet by 2025. The opportunity created by the ability of people, things, process and data all being connected and interacting with each other will generate global value of some $19 trillion over the next 10 years in either new revenue opportunities or operational cost savings – surely the biggest disruption we have seen to date, and the greatest opportunity for the broader industry and those that are attending and participating in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival.
Earlier in the year Cisco Investments allocated $150 million in early-stage funds to accelerate the development of disruptive technology markets, including Big Data and Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), Connected Mobility, and other areas.
It is truly an exciting time to be an innovator or disruptor in this space and at Cisco UKI we are especially interested in interesting IoT companies to integrate into our BIG programme, and in particular, to accelerate and incubate at IDEALondon.
If you think you have an interesting solution, please leave a comment or tweet @BigHTom and make sure you visit www.ciscobig.co.uk to sign-up to our newsletter to receive the latest innovation updates.
Enjoy the DIF – it’s going to be a greatfestival of Disruptive Innovation, hosted predominantly online, and make sure that you catch our own CTO in engineering Dave Ward talking about IoE and the Possibilities of a Connected World on Tuesday 21st October.
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