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Through collective management at Cisco Systems in the United States, practitioners at all levels of management, rather than just a select few, overcame various contradictions through “strategic collaborations” across divisions within the company to respond to the challenge of new business innovation. Moreover, through skillful management of leadership at the formal organization layer, the informal organization layer, and the psychological boundary layer (the boundary layer between the two aforementioned layers), all practitioners of the company demonstrated holistic leadership, which enabled creative dialogue, cooperation, and understanding as well as rapid decision-making and action. Strategic collaboration based on holistic leadership enables outstanding ideas to be readily incorporated into the organization and to be examined and acted on by a single team. This chapter discusses processes whereby collective management based on Cisco System’s holistic leadership changed staff behavior and the corporate culture to achieve business innovation.

Innovation, reverse innovation, frugal innovation and disruptive innovation.

Undergraduate, Postgraduate and Executive Education.

This case describes the strategy adopted by Cisco India to develop the Advanced Services Router 901 (“ASR 901”), which is a next-generation 3G/LTE capable mobile backhaul and carrier Ethernet platform that is deployed at a cellular tower site or business premise to backhaul voice and data traffic into the core of the network. This was part of a larger strategy by Cisco headquarters to understand what could be built in the developing markets for the developing markets, as opposed to products conceived with only developed markets as the focus. Within a time frame of a few months, a team formed from scratch developed the ASR 901, the next-generation global networking technology product that was developed completely – from conception to launch – at the Bangalore site in India. The ASR 901 successfully took on the challenge of delivering all the functionalities and features required by sophisticated telecom clients, while meeting the specific requirements of its customers from the developing markets. ASR 901 was undoubtedly a milestone in Cisco India's indigenous innovation initiatives, and this case discusses the many challenges that had been faced during the process and the actions that had been taken to achieve success during this process.

Through this case, students will understand the concepts of innovation, particularly reverse innovation, frugal innovation and disruptive innovation. They will learn how large organisations have managed to successfully innovate by creating small and independent teams within the organisation. Students would also have the opportunity to analyse and discuss whether the lessons learnt by Cisco, while progressing through the several stages of developing the ASR 901 product, could be applied to similar new initiatives.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

This case focuses on Cisco Systems' innovative probe-and-learn approach to using social media to launch its ASR 1000 Series Edge Router. The company had decided to eschew traditional print and TV media in marketing the new product and had decided instead to focus its efforts entirely on digital marketing and social media to attract the attention of its target market. The case discusses Cisco's bold plan to launch the ASR 1000 Series “virtually, visually, and virally” and the digital tactics employed by the Cisco Systems marketing team to accomplish this ambitious goal. Business marketers normally adopt a more serious and traditional approach to marketing its products but in this case Cisco had decided to buck that trend by exploring digital tools and social gaming avenues which its target client—the technical community—were increasingly frequenting. Cisco's challenge lay in whether this new approach and resultant value proposition would resonate with its technical audience and give the ASR 1000 Router the kind of publicity it needed to have. The case is set at a time when social media was burgeoning as a promising way to engage consumers more deeply with brands and products, but marketers were still experimenting with the tools and tactics of social media for marketing.

Understand the relevance of social media for product launches as a function of contextual factors such as nature of product, media habits, and company credibility. Learn about the applicability of social media for business marketers in terms of its uniqueness, advantages and challenges. Recognize the relationship between campaign objectives and the value proposition for the product. Understand the evolution of social media marketing from a probe-and-learn approach to a strategy-driven process. The initial test and learn approach must be enhanced and become more strategic in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of event design principles in the creation and execution of effective experiential sponsorship activations (ESAs) by B2B brands and examine the challenges posed by the sponsorship context to sponsors seeking to create ESAs, with proposed potential solutions.

A case study of Cisco’s ESA activities as part of its London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games sponsorship activation is developed, drawing on interviews with key Cisco employees and secondary sources of data, both internal and external to Cisco.

Blending the event design principles typically associated with B2B events with those more commonly found in corporate hospitality or B2C events enables sponsors to address the cognitive needs of attendees as business representatives, while also satisfying their needs as individuals seeking more sensorial experiences. Effective use of event design principles, creative marketing and promotion, and collaboration with other sponsors allow brands to overcome constraints placed on them by the unpredictable nature of sponsorship, sponsorship rights agreements and the increased clutter in the sponsorship environment.

Existing knowledge on sponsorship activation is extended, drawing on principles of event design to offer a sponsor-focused perspective on the creation and execution of effective ESAs for B2B brands. Existing thinking around B2B event design is challenged and augmented when considering its application to ESA design.

Inter-sponsor collaboration and the blending of cognitive and sensorial elements of event design are important for sponsors seeking to create and deliver effective ESAs.

The paper draws on the event design literature to appraise the execution of ESA by B2B brands within the context of event sponsorship.

IOS firmware diversity, the unintended consequence of a complex firmware compilation process, has historically made reliable exploitation of Cisco routers difficult. With approximately 300,000 unique IOS images in existence, a new class of version‐agnostic shellcode is needed in order to make the large‐scale exploitation of Cisco IOS possible. The purpose of this paper is to show that such attacks are now feasible by demonstrating two different reliable shellcodes that will operate correctly over many Cisco hardware platforms and all known IOS versions.

The paper examines prior work in the area of Cisco IOS rootkits and constructs a novel IOS version‐agnostic rootkit called the interrupt‐hijack rootkit.

As the experimental results show, the techniques proposed in this paper can reliably inject command and control capabilities into arbitrary IOS images in a version‐agnostic manner.

The authors believe that the technique presented in this paper overcomes an important hurdle in the large‐scale, reliable rootkit execution within Cisco IOS. Thus, effective host‐based defence for such routers is imperative for maintaining the integrity of our global communication infrastructures.

This paper aims to present a case study of Cisco's corporate development approach which shows how the company built a powerful new business capability: the discipline of selecting the best pathways – build, borrow or buy – to follow when pursuing growth opportunities.

In order for companies to achieve viable growth, business leaders must evaluate all three alternative pathways, which this paper looks into.

The paper revelas that Cisco provides an excellent example of a company that has, over the years, learned how to develop the capability to use the full range of development modes.

This case is based on research for Build, Borrow or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma by Laurence Capron and Will Mitchell.

In the way it blends all of the growth modes, Cisco demonstrates the value of top‐level leadership for what should be seen as an enterprise discipline: strategically coordinated building, borrowing and buying.

The case illustrates how Cisco has learned to blend these development initiatives into a balanced and very effective resource portfolio.

The emphasis on inter-organizational systems gave rise to concerns about inter-organizational relationships as trading partners became aware of the socio-political factors and trust that affect their relationships. This paper examines the importance of inter-organizational-trust in business-to-business E-commerce organizations. It examines how inter-organizational relationships impact trading partner trust, perceived benefits, perceived risks, and technology trust mechanisms in E-commerce that can in turn influence outcomes of business-to-business E-commerce. This paper develops a conceptual model and tests the model using a case study research methodology. The aim is to solicit qualitative in depth understanding of inter-organizational-trust in business-to-business E-commerce. Eight organizations from a cross section of industries that formed four bi-directional dyads participated in the third stage of this study. The first two stages include exploratory case studies in three organizations in the automotive industry that applied EDI via Value-Added-Networks in 1997, and a nationwide survey of organizations that examined the extent of E-commerce adoption in Australia and New Zealand in 1998. The findings identify the need for trustworthy business relationships in an E-commerce environment.

This paper aims to discuss how two innovative firms – the French telecommunications firm Orange and the California‐based global networking firm Cisco – have gained competitive advantage from using the co‐creative enterprise business concept to generate sustainable growth.

The paper describes in detail the approach at Orange, which is on co‐creating experience environments with customers and industry mavens, and at Cisco, where the focus is on co‐creating the management of risk and reward.

Companies that have learned how to manage the process of creating unique value with customers and other stakeholders have developed engagement programs and processes that enable interactions among all stakeholders everywhere in the system, with the goal of creating greater value by fostering more rewarding or more valuable experiences.

Two case examples of innovative practices are presented.

Orange's R&D and marketing processes have attracted lead‐users and early adopters, who are extremely valuable since they are more likely to be content co‐creators and the core adopters of their services. Cisco is attempting to extend its co‐creative governance frameworks through collaborative interactions with its customers and partners.

The paper alerts leaders that business and society are moving towards an individual‐ and experience‐based view of co‐creative engagement among individuals and institutions – outside and inside enterprises.

This interview aims to discuss Ciso's approach to innovation with Inder Sidhu, Senior Vice President Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations and a member of the company's Operating Committee. His new book about managing seemingly contradictory alternatives is Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth.

The paper presents an interview with Sidhu whose thesis: “Our experience at Cisco” suggests that the concept of “Doing Both” is relevant to a wide range of management decisions and people must learneto look at every opportunity not as a choice between apparently conflicting goals, but rather a way of obtaining a multiplier effect by seeking and meeting two apparently conflicting goals.

Sidhu advocates that organizations actively manage three sources of change in their organization – sustaining change that improves the existing business, disruptive change that needs to be developed outside the core business and externally sourced change that can be spun into the business.

Sidhu believes that doing both means asking your organization to elevate its game. But asking is, by itself, not enough. Leaders need to change their organization – its approval processes, its reward systems, its innovation language and its expectations about the rate of change.

According to Sidhu, based on Cisco's experience, doing both seems to work best in market transitions, when the nature of the market is changing or there is potential for new business models and disruptive approaches.