Give a brief introduction to your role within Cisco and Innovate UK?
When I joined Cisco 22 years ago I think there were 10 people in the UK and now there is 7,000 or so, so it is a significantly bigger company that has come through quite a lot of change. Obviously my role now as chief executive of UK and Ireland is basically being responsible for everything that goes on in the UK and Ireland, not only the sales but the significant amount of R&D and other things that we do in the UK and Ireland. So it is a big business, biggest outside the US and has been for some time, so that is great.
I am the non-exec chairman of Innovate UK, formerly the Technology Strategy Board, which was previously a government advisory body some nine years ago. At that time, it was responsible for advising the UK’s Department of Trade on technology strategy, but then subsequently was floated out of government, to become an arm’s-length body. So it has its own CEO and a couple of hundred people who work for Innovate UK all the time, technologists and other folks.
What key technologies and new business models are you seeing now as opportunities or threats to business more generally in society, through those roles you have?
Probably right across the piece, but certainly with my Cisco hat on, there is no doubt there is a whole digital revolution – the digitisation of companies, and that means the companies recognising that the widespread and universal connectivity of everything in their organisation, the simplification of their processes, but most importantly the smart and incisive use of the data they have within organisations to help them be more sophisticated in the way that they operate. It is a huge force sweeping through. We see the web guys like Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on, where they have obviously got super-optimised ways of doing things, are challenging industries all over the place. When you talk to most of the retailers, they care less about each other now and much more about what Amazon and some of the born-on-the-web people are doing. Change is happening to every company. I do not know a single company I talk to now that does not see that digitisation or making their business more digital, as something they want to do. So that is a big force.
On top of that there is the whole principle with new technologies, or increasingly affordable centre technology and increasingly sophisticated networks, the whole internet of things. So suddenly everything – not just a few billion people – are connected to the internet. Tens, hundreds, billions, even trillions of things are connected in some way that allows them to create what is probably the next generation of the internet.
Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, we did not dream up all those when the internet started. We are probably not going to dream up the next thing. So that, of course, plays to the things I see in Innovate UK, like healthcare and high-performance computing and analysis capability that you get for gene sequencing. You get energy usage or shared platforms for managing energy and so on, so huge amounts of interesting changes are happening, some of it underpinned by fundamental technologies but a lot of it underpinned now by this whole digitisation of our world.
Technology is not necessarily the barrier, it is how these new business models affect organisations in what I would term innovative new value chains – how you string together these technologies or startups in new ways for corporates. How are you seeing Cisco developing its capabilities to support that?
For Cisco, we are recognising that over the years our strategy has always been a build-by-partner, co-develop and invest sort of model. We are building stuff and we still spend huge amounts of money on R&D, and that means you need to keep innovating. If you are going to be a leader you need to keep innovating yourself. Startups are providing you with other aspects of technology innovation, which may be better developed in the market, and then taking it to an organisation like Cisco which can scale them. Then the partner model is significant and increasingly significant. We have always been very partner-orientated. But in this new internet of things, cloud and digitised world, we clearly are not going to do everything. If you are running a city, there are traffic light systems and building control systems and things in hospitals that are not necessarily Cisco technology, but they are all connected somehow.
In terms of co-development, we have a big relationship with Apple now and with others. This is where we are seeing a necessity to pull those things together. Then there is our investment portfolio. You and I again have discussed how you go out and start to become part of or to start to look at small companies, to help to support them and grow them. Then locally we have got an innovation programme that allows us, on the ground, to be touching lots of companies, getting a lot of engagement with startups that are not necessarily core to Cisco, but are part of that bigger system that our customers are involved in. We have a couple of innovation centres in London and several more around the country that are connecting more than we are creating. They allow us to get that local touch.
We have done some work with some companies under an Innovate UK project looking at the next generation of stations, railway stations and such like. This involves working with organisations in that ecosystem which would not naturally have been things we were involved in, but these stations and trains and whatever are all being digitised in some way. People want to have access to things while they are on the trains. We are doing another one up in Scotland on flood management and connecting together all the services that do that in a much more sophisticated way. There are new ecosystems evolving.
Where do you see the role for the UK?
I think the UK is really exciting. The truth is we have and are widely quoted as having the best universities in the world. We have much of the highly cited research and development in the world. We have the best stuff coming out of that system. But we have also got incredible, active startup environments, which you and I are involved in, where we are seeing exciting startups, whether it be in the biomedical space or in the genetic space, or in transport or media or some of the things that are happening in the web companies in tech.
All of those are really exciting, and Innovate UK has the ability to support particularly those companies which we sort of ignored a little bit in in the past. When you have a general narrative about supporting startups, people often think of web-type startups – relatively low cost of entry. But there are lots of other startups. If you are a company creating a medical device, you have long trials to do, bits of R&D, patient trials to deal with, legislation and so on. They need support, and Innovate UK is in a great position to give those kinds of companies and organisations an ability to keep moving forward. At the same time, it is good to keep that great technology and innovation in the UK, until they are at the point when they can create a prototype and take it to someone to get funded. Innovate UK can take them to the next step.
We are also doing the same for government organisations, which also need that help with startups, such as the Small Business Research Initiative programme in Innovate UK. What are the things the government needs to be better at and how can you engage startups in doing that? So there are a lot of great opportunities for Innovate UK to do those kinds of things and they are important in supporting the UK in driving economic growth, driving productivity and driving real advantage for the country.
What does the next 22 years hold – any forethought or foresight?
It is clear that there are some very exciting things happening, such as the widely publicised autonomous vehicles. And there is the whole concept of machine learning, like Siri, Apple’s voice recognition capability – it is getting smarter all the time. Without any kind of apocalyptic perspective on it, that is very exciting in its ability to adapt itself to become more and more useable.
Think of something like Siri when it first came out, when it barely understood English, to now when you can have an amazingly simple conversation, and Amazon Echo and all these other things that are coming out now similar to that, which is incredible. And they are changing the way we do things. That in itself is exciting, but I think when you look at the world of things like gene sequencing and so on, you will know this fact that from 2001 it was $100m to sequence a single gene and now we are below $1,000 and we are heading for below $100 to do it. That is a million-fold reduction in cost, and that has been driven by new computing powers, smarter algorithms, smarter networks and so on. Look at the opportunity for medicine, things like precision medicine and stratified medicine it is called, ways of building drugs that just work for you and not for me. That is super exciting.
I have got a young autistic lad who has been coming to us for many years in respite care. He is a good friend of the family, and Siri has totally changed his life. He has a relatively young writing age but he now uses Siri to read his messages, to talk back to us, save notes. It is incredible. It has fundamentally made him more mobile, more able to engage in society. Those sorts of technologies are just amazing, I think.
What do you do when you are not busy running the offices of Cisco and Innovate UK?
I do a lot of triathlons. I started nine years ago, and I was lucky enough two years ago to qualify for the GB team within my age group, so I went to Canada and represented Britain in my age group, which was pretty cool. Then I have done a charity thing for the past few years where I get about 30 CEOs together, who do some kind of triathlon-based challenge. We are hoping to raise over £300,000 for Sport Relief.