UNB Engineering News

Kevin McCracken, (BScEE’92) loves what he does. As Director of Business Development for Cisco Systems he works with service providers like Bell, Telus and Rogers to understand their needs and provide solutions to help them streamline and grow. It’s a career that combines business and technology every single day to solve problems.

Kevin knew early on that he wanted a career that blended business with engineering. He was finance-oriented even in high school when he first started buying stocks. But he also loved physics and math, and figured engineering would be a good path – he comes from a family of engineers and technologists, including his father, and was fascinated by the changes he was seeing at his father’s company (a predecessor to AT&T Canada). His neighbour, a UNB engineering professor named Eugene Hill, took him to visit UNB’s Engineering Associate Dean, Verne Ireton, who suggested that Kevin would indeed do well to take electrical engineering, and should follow it up with an MBA.  He followed that plan and hasn’t looked back.

While completing his undergraduate degree at UNB, Kevin enrolled in the newly launched Technology Management and Entrepreneurship (TME) program to learn how to apply the engineering knowledge he was gaining to real-world problems. His eyes were opened to the ways to use tech entrepreneurially in business, and the five classes he took solidified his plan to earn an MBA later on. “Engineering and good ideas are nothing unless they can be applied. And applying them usually means working within a business and collaborating with a team and with customers.”

He went directly from UNB to work at Nortel in Ottawa in a customer-facing position engineering wide area networks for commercial clients. He oversaw a large project with a customer in Mexico City, and while in this role figured out that he should be on the product management side; he was good at figuring out the customer’s needs and working with a team to recommend the right product to meet those needs. He moved into that product management role at Nortel and was also able to take a year off to complete an MBA at Queens. He left Nortel as the company began to struggle, and went to a small startup in Toronto, which had a working relationship with Cisco. That opened the door to the multinational tech giant and he’s been with Cisco for the past eleven years.

At Cisco, Kevin first worked exclusively with Bell Canada to develop new Cisco-based products and solutions with them. These were large complex projects that required collaborating with people across various functions and disciplines. For the last number of years, Kevin has moved to a larger role working on business development in Canada and the U.S., where he builds relationships with companies to create a strategy that supports their efforts. He leads a team that works across all the Canadian service providers as well as some of the US cable operators.

Kevin says he loves the change that his industry and company is in. “There’s something new every day and it makes it exciting.” He says although Cisco is at a 16-year high in stock value they are operating in a very different environment now than ever before. With the startup world growing so quickly and hardware solutions yielding to software solutions, they’ve had to make a major shift. “It’s forced us to employ a different skill set, which is a great thing.” And one of those skills, he says, is entrepreneurial thinking.

Cisco values what they call “internal entrepreneurship”; after all, they need to stay ahead of the competition and meet the ever-changing needs of their customers quickly. Every quarter, they drive the creation of new ideas through an internal competition run very similarly to those in the venture capitalist world. Ideas are pitched to a panel that narrows entries down to a handful of the best and puts them to a vote with all Cisco employees. The winner receives funding to create their product.

“The skills I learned way back in the TME program are being applied every day in my work. The combination of tech, business, and entrepreneurial skills is what’s helped me get here and thrive.”

Not every student coming to UNB has a plan as defined as Kevin’s was. But he paid attention to what he enjoyed doing, took opportunities and advice when they came to him and worked hard. And it’s obviously paid off. He’s passionate about his work, loves living with his wife and four daughters in Oakville and taking the train to his Toronto office, and still has time to reconnect with family and friends from New Brunswick on a regular basis.  “UNB was a launching pad for my whole career.”

Learn more about UNB's 1-year Masters in Technology Management and Entrepreneurship program.