DUBLIN, Ireland, September 17, 2010 – Your Country, Your Call, the Irish initiative seeking innovative ideas to foster economic recovery, had 117,000 visitors to its website from 176 countries over ten weeks, according to Cisco which provided the collaboration technology to manage the online event. Nine thousand entries were submitted, and finalists engaged interactively in the competition.
The scale of the Your Country, Your Call competition required a robust technology platform, which was entirely designed and delivered by Cisco. It provided the user licences for the competition platform, ran the website on its corporate servers, and provided complete 24/7 technical support. Cisco also extended the use of its online virtual meeting technologies WebEx® and Cisco TelePresenceTM to enable effective collaboration when necessary.
Of the 9,000 ideas submitted, 20 semi-finalists were selected. These included the potential to make Ireland a global media hub; establishing an intellectual-property-based financial securities market; installing solar photovoltaic electricity-generating units on existing wind farms; establishing Ireland as an online gaming jurisdiction; building an entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem around digital services; and setting up an international health care services centre in Ireland.
The two winning entries will be announced tomorrow evening (17 September), with each to receive a cash prize of €100,000. Both winning proposals will be implemented with the support of an independent working group and a development fund of up to €500,000 for each project.
Cisco shared its own experience in the design and running of global Web-based innovation competitions and acted as an adviser through all stages of the competition.
“Cisco is one of the most innovative companies in the world. The support and input it provided to this initiative were invaluable. Cisco’s involvement began with a phone call following a Harvard Business Review article on the success of the company’s global I-Prize competition. That phone call set off an in-depth and multi-faceted collaboration which ensured our competition was based on the soundest of platforms, would be run on top-class technology, and could be delivered with the Cisco quality hallmark. You couldn’t really ask for more,” said Austin Hogan, programme director, Your Country Your Call.
Kim Majerus, managing director, Cisco Ireland, said: “Ireland is famous for its entrepreneurial culture, especially in the technology sector. Innovation can come from anybody, anywhere. This competition was about encouraging these ideas, enabling people to take that innovative idea and give them a platform to develop it. We were delighted to be an adviser and the sole technology provider in this project, sharing our experiences and technology to assist in this transformation approach.”
She added, “Our aim is now to help other countries to replicate the world-leading approach adopted in Ireland, and we have a number of such projects already in the advanced planning stages. The Your Country, Your Call event is a model of how online collaboration is vibrant in Ireland.”
Your Country, Your Call was created by Dr. Martin McAleese to find two transformational proposals that will enable the Irish economy to grow, employment to be created, and prosperity to flourish. With Mary McAleese, president of Ireland, as its patron, the initiative spanned a broad range of categories from sports to communications and technology.
Links / URLs:
Your Country, Your Call: www.yourcountryyourcall.com
Cisco UK and Ireland Newsroom: http://newsroom.cisco.com/uk
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Your Country Your Call, Ireland, Cisco, Transformation, Collaboration, President of Ireland, Webex
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