Deutsche Telekom Laboratories as a Testbed for Modern Technology and Innovation Management
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories has been set up with the ambition to be one of the leading places for corporate research and innovation in the industry.
Consequently, not only the topics that are being worked on must be leading edge but also the way in which work is done.
Telekom Laboratories has completed its first five years of operation – sufficient time to validate which approaches proved successful and which not.
In this sense, the implementation and innovation management oriented “Innovation Development” unit of Telekom Laboratories has proved a very successful and extraordinary testbed for advanced methods in the management of technology and innovation coming from science (Yin 2008) and, as such, has already frequently been the subject of innovation researchers’ investigations.
As the telecommunications industry is undergoing r adical technological change, the approaches described here can be seen as howtos for dealing with technology shocks (Arnold 2003).
Within the past decades, the introduction of the overarching All-IP system has changed the entire value creation process and structures of the industry.
The network architecture has moved from single “stovepipes” to a delayered and modular production, leading to easier and faster deployment of new services involving more market players, whereas the standardization of interfaces is bringing in millions of additional innovators (e.g., web developers).
As a result, major network operators have to compete in an open, standardized environment with a high degree of complexity caused by the large numbers of products and innovators, as well as the continuous uncertainty of future markets and technologies.
The answer must lie in the build up of a sustainable innovation system where not everything needs to be done but rather selected smartly.
The setup interfaces and integrates with the huge community of innovators through applied innovation and management tools in an open way and differentiates smartly.
Thus one of the recurring themes in this book has to do with openness – how to build an open innovation system that still allows for distinct differentiation.
Telekom Laboratories has not only been at the forefront of a very recent development in corporate R&D by building on five years of experience in smart openness in research and innovation thus providing an environment suited to dealing with complexity and uncertainty.
It has also been extremely thorough in implementing the principles of open innovation in a corporate core unit so close to top level corporate decision makers (Picot and Doeblin 2009).
Telekom Laboratories consist of Strategic Research and Innovation Development.
Strategic Research incorporates four chairs of the Berlin Institute of Technology.
This is why Telekom Laboratories follows a two-directional strategy: On the one hand Innovation Development fosters innovation extending corporate roadmap, whereas Strategic Research follows a “grass root strategy” (Mintzberg 1989) by cultivating several ideas without directly referring to their use within Deutsche Telekom at all times.
Innovation Development is organized in five focus fields of innovation.
Highly innovative research is not directly controllable, while innovation often results from serendipity (Mittelstraß 1994; Münch 2007).
Innovation happens at the edge of knowledge fields and disciplines. Telekom Laboratories takes into account the importance of interdisciplinary collaborative research within a multi-cultural organization. Interdisciplinarity is one of the structure-forming elements of organizational design.
Within the project fields, computer scientists, economists, software and electrical engineers, designers, psychologists, and sociologists work closely together, leading to a strong, interwoven technological and socio-economic competence.
This enables social trends to be identified and extrapolated, and scenarios to be developed for future product development.
The book’s logic does not aim at completeness, but rather dives into selected core topics of innovation management:
C. Integrating customer feedback as an essential aspect of early market research in the open innovation processes.
D. Methods of early stage new product development based on enterprise architecture, modularization, and the idea of building blocks.
B. Organizing to get the most out of openness with the appropriate structures as well as integrating research and business partners.
E. Implementing and tracking the exploitation of innovation results in the business units and applying new alternative methodical routes of with venturing aspects.
A. Detecting weak signals in the environment, acquiring information in a world of knowledge, and identifying the areas of differentiation through R&D.
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FUENTE: Arnold, H., Erner, M., Möckel, P., & Schläffer, C. (2010). Deutsche Telekom Laboratories as a Testbed for Modern Technology and Innovation Management. In Applied Technology and Innovation Management (pp. 5-11). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.