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Kate O'Keeffe

Senior Director

Customer and Partner Innovation

Kate O’Keeffe is Cisco’s Senior Director of Customer and Partner Innovation. She brings a wealth of experience in innovation and entrepreneurship to her role, driving new customer solutions within Cisco’s engineering organization.

Prior to her current role, Kate was founder and leader of Cisco CHILL, a co-innovation catalyst designed to drive disruptive innovation with and for Cisco customers. Her passion to solve bold problems that don’t yet have answers grew out of her long-term desire to find better, faster ways to approach big global issues such as environmental and population challenges. With CHILL, she developed a unique methodology that leapfrogged traditional innovation processes to spark broad industry change. During the three years of CHILL innovation, a full 70 percent of ideas progressed to further stages, resulting in two start-ups, seven patents, and more than 20 joint projects and internal growth initiatives. She continues to drive the CHILL co-innovation methodology in her current role.

Previously Kate was the global leader of the Services Innovation Excellence Center at Cisco, where she was responsible for driving sustainable innovation capability for Cisco Services. The practice is based on an Innovation Maturity Model, devised to provide a clear pathway for businesses to build sustainable, measureable innovation capability.

Prior to Cisco, Kate led innovation for an Australian-based corporation in the utilities sector.

As a native of Melbourne, Kate proved her entrepreneurial chops as a fashion designer by founding, building, and exiting a successful shoe business, Cinderella Bella.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and is the recipient of numerous industry awards and recognitions, including the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize: Innovating Innovation Challenge. Kate was also named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” and included in the Anita Borg Institute’s annual Women of Vision awards. Most recently, Kate was named one of the Upstart 50 2018 by the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal.

She is co-author of “Managing Multiparty Innovation,” which was published in the Harvard Business Review in November, 2016.

Articles

September 21, 2017

3

INNOVATION

To Save Tomorrow: The Promise and Peril of the Augmented Worker

From iRobot to R2D2 to Star Trek’s Data, the concept of robots and humans working together has always been part of the science-fiction world. Below, Philip the co-bot carries on this tradition as we continue our comic-book vision of the Future of Work. For years, robots have taken on repetitive, dan…

September 15, 2017

INNOVATION

Open Up the Pipeline for Future Workers

We can’t talk about the future of work without considering the worker of the future. Who will that worker be? What kinds of skills will she or he need to thrive in an era of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation? And how will companies find, recruit, and train the workers they will need to com…

August 31, 2017

3

INNOVATION

To Save Tomorrow: Who Will Be the Worker of the Future?

The Future of Work is a huge topic.  How will we attract and retain the worker of the future? How can we leverage the latest technology to augment the worker of the future? What will the workplaces of the future be like?  It’s the subject of conferences, white papers, speculation, pontificating, and…

August 15, 2017

4

INNOVATION

Superheroes Wanted: Envisioning the Future of Work

For decades, we have imagined the future through the eyes of comic book heroes — from boy-next-door Peter Parker’s Spiderman to Amazon princess Wonder Woman. So, as we approach our next Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Lab, focused on the future of work, I thought we might explore that part of our futur…

July 20, 2017

5

INNOVATION

Shaping the Future of Work: Three Questions to Ask

What will work look like in 10 years? We’ve heard a lot about the ways new technologies—artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics and the like—will disrupt work as we know it. Will we have a shiny new future, where machines take over menial or repetitive tasks so people can be free to pursu…

June 29, 2017

1

INNOVATION

Top 5 Snapshots from Cisco Live

What a great year to be at Cisco Live! There was so much going on—from visionary keynotes to the World of Solutions exhibits, to the many sessions that let attendees go deep into the areas that interested them. What I heard and saw challenged my thinking in some areas, and confirmed what I’ve been l…

June 21, 2017

14

INNOVATION

MyWays: How Two Days of Innovation Helped Build a Startup from Scratch

As leader of Cisco’s Hyper Innovation Living Labs (CHILL) I see first-hand the race for breakthrough ideas. Markets are moving fast, and everyone is trying to leapfrog the leaders. Yet, even as big companies become leaner and more agile, too many innovation efforts lead nowhere. Even if the will and…

June 12, 2017

3

INNOVATION

Let’s CHILL: Industry-Wide Innovation on Hyper Drive

How does innovation happen? People joke about an idea hitting them in the shower. Or it might be while on vacation, or walking the dog—any time your mind is free to wander into creativity. But developing that lone spark of an idea into an innovative solution is no vacation. It requires focus, radica…