Abstract: 

Leveraging analytics and artificial intelligence to transform operations is a material opportunity for any corporation. While an in-house team to develop solutions is often part of this effort, more value can in many cases be unleashed by partnering with strong startups: If a credible solution that fits the use case already exists, adopting it is generally faster, less expensive, and less risky compared to building an in-house solution from scratch. Unfortunately, incubating startup partnerships is a nascent capability at best for most corporations. Access to startups is sub-scale, due diligence processes are ad-hoc, and there are no best-practice-based playbooks for proof-of-concept execution and scaled deployment. This talk will explain how Cisco is building its startup partnership capability to drive analytics and artificial intelligence solutions across its operations.

Bio: 

Dr. Christian Vogt is the Director of Strategy and Innovation at Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley. He drives applications of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence cross-functionally in sales and marketing, customer success and support, account management and renewals, and operations and supply chain. As part of this role, Christian partners with world-class startups and venture capital firms in and beyond Silicon Valley, innovating outside-in to address high-impact opportunities across Cisco. Christian regularly writes on issues related to digital, innovation, and transformation at www.premainstream.com.

Christian has a Ph.D. in engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of Germany’s designated elite universities, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. He has written 20 books and other publications and holds 13 patents. He has lived and worked in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Finland, and Germany.