Padmasree Warrior: Incentivizing Breakthroughs

The way we do innovation. There's a lot of innovation that happens in our engineering organization. We invest roughly $6 billion in engineering worldwide. We have about 26,000 engineers distributed across the globe. And they're working on everything from access points to security technologies, to data center, to collaboration, radio, networking, all of that. So there's a big group of innovation that occurs in that group. In addition, we have groups that work with customers, that focus really on understanding the customer issues and customer problems and translate that technology into value, business value. So there is innovation. We call that a services organization. So they're actually delivering business services. So they guarantee outcomes to our customers. So they will go into a manufacturing customer of ours and say, we can help you transition to the Internet of everything. And so there's a lot of innovation in that group that does that. In addition, in my group, in the corporate group, in the center group, we have a group of people. Actually, Maciek, who leads that group, is here. We have about 50 to 60 people in that group that are very focused on the future. And they work with universities, they work with labs, they work with incubators, they work with startups. They scan everything. And we have people distributed all over the world to do that. So that's another way we think about what is happening. We keep in touch with what's happening, and we make investments. We make investments in startups, and we make investments in incubators and in funds that invest in other companies. So there's a huge pool that we pull from, and that's kind of how it's structured. The incentives vary. I think each group is measured on a different incentive, and we have different metrics on how we measure that. How many new products did we release? What part of our revenue is coming from new refreshed products versus traditional products? How much of our profit is coming from new products. We also talk about moving into different adjacencies, as we call it. So we've kind of expanded from being a switching and routing company to becoming more of a data center company, security company, a collaboration company, video company. So through our years, we measure ourselves on how quickly are we moving out of our traditional footprint footprint into new areas.