All of these amazing concepts paint a new picture of the Smart City, not so much as a series of connected systems but as an intelligent, living and breathing beast whose purpose is to improve the Quality of Life of its inhabitants. In fact, the Smart City may be comparable to the human body, which plays host to billions of helpful bacteria and provides the perfect environment for them to thrive, except in this case we bacteria are designing the host instead of adapting to it.

At the heart of the Smart City is the network, or central nervous system through which flows data that controls all of the peripheral functions. This system feeds on and digests information from the cloud, soaking up the ambient intelligence that permeates our lives, and that until now has been unavailable for consumption.

To this raw material of environmental data it adds a level of intelligence that allows it to analyse this data, hypothesise on predicted consequences and take action to preserve the status quo based on the balance of probability. It is more than logical, it is Smart.

Through this nervous system, the Smart City “knows” everything. It knows that there is a light on in your bathroom but that nobody has been there for 10 minutes. It knows that there is an accident on Main Street and that a traffic jam is imminent that will prevent emergency vehicles from reaching the spot. It also knows that the cold weather means that more people will be taking hot baths which will put a strain on the water and power systems, and it compensates for all of these scenarios by taking the appropriate action. It turns your bathroom light off. It diverts traffic courtesy of the traffic lights to reduce delays and clear a path for emergency vehicles. And it begins to store more power and water to allow for predicted demand.

In this sense, the Smart City is an instinctive organism which is every bit as complex as a living bio-chemical system such as a coral reef. But who will design build this creature? Right now, the design of this magnificent beast is vertically aligned, the ultimate illustration of a silo mentality, and if we continue down this path it is hard to imagine anything other than a Smart City that is more akin to Frankenstein than Pinocchio, with disparate systems roughly cobbled together to give basic functionality but no hope of evolution into a more graceful, serene and effective creature.

As one example, today we are making significant progress in solutions which allow us to plan the recharging of electric vehicles to reduce the “range anxiety” that comes with these vehicles. But of course if everyone tries to recharge their vehicles at the same time, the grid would not be able to cope, and so we have to develop a solution that crosses the transport and power verticals to plan the load and prevent this from happening. And once we have done this, we will realise that there are other benefits such as the grid being able to use fully charged but dormant electric vehicles as a micro-storage mechanism to help refine its consumption response.

Today the evidence of serious projects designed to develop cross vertical M2M solutions is scarce.It is not as simple as laying this at the doorstep of our Governments, but it is also interesting to note where the progress is actually being made. Smart Cities themselves are not being driven and funded as projects very often by Governments, but instead by private sector verticals – but where they are, these kinds of issues are being resolved more quickly. So perhaps we can conclude that increasing the involvement of Government in a leadership role in Smart City initiatives would result in a better outcome, faster.

Maybe it is time we all began to work together in collaborative ecosystems like the ng Connect Program to make sure that we begin this journey in the right way, with centrally-organised design and creation from an authority with a pure motive and no vertical agenda – that is to make our lives better.

Rob Parkes
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

Act I

In my current position I travel a lot and/or I work late in the office. This is nothing unexpected when your scope covers Europe, Middle East and Africa and when a lot of your colleagues are at least six hours behind, but it makes staying in touch with the family an interesting sport. Basically I try to reach out to my wife and kids when I can, from taxis, hotels, between two planes or when I finally finish my last call of the day and am on my way home as “early” as I can. It does not always work. My wife has a life and things to do. She is not always in front of a computer reading emails, Facebook or Twitter messages. When she is home she usually leaves her smartphone either in its charger or in her purse. And when she puts our 18-month-old little girl to bed for her naps or at night she unplugs the home phone. So more times than not I end up worrying on the road or coming home to a cold pizza or worse to a locked door, under the rain, while my wife is taking a shower. (I do have a key but she leaves hers in the lock so it doesn’t really help.)

I know there is a lot of talk these days about machine-to-machine communication but it seems to me there is still room for improvement on communication between people!

Act II

A little more than a month ago I attended the TEDSalon in London, an event largely sponsored by fellow ng Connect member frog. The theme of the event was a journey through space, time and imagination. Speakers included artists, performers, academics, young startups and even a politician sharing his thoughts about the British Empire – which I am not going to comment on, in respect to the Entente Cordiale. One of the speakers was Rory Sutherland, an executive vice-president at the Ogilvy Group, who was asked to discuss his latest book about behavioral economics, The Wiki Man. He did so in a lively and colorful way. Book copies were available for all attendees, so I picked mine, brought it home and added it to my reading pile.

When I finally read it, I found some really interesting perspectives on consumer behavior, branding and advertising. What made me pause was a short section on SMS and Facebook/Twitter and why they really appeal to users, even without advertising. In short, Rory Sutherland explains that people are inhibited from using certain forms of communication when the effort is high (“a phone call demands five minutes of pleasantries which an SMS does not”) or when it has too great a level of either importance or  intrusion to justify the content. The new experience provided by Facebook and Twitter is that they are semi-addressable forms of communication: “they confine your outpourings to a community of friends – but the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals”. This means people can communicate about trivial things – like waiting in line at an airport – without imposing on others. Imagine if you received an email or a phone call every time one of your relatives gets a coffee at Starbucks!

Reading this book was my catalyst. It occurred to me that users have these great, convenient tools to initiate communication in the way that suits their purpose and messages. But what about people on the receiving end? Aren’t they constrained by the communication medium picked by the person addressing them? You don’t want to talk but your phone rings. You need to carry your cell phone or smartphone with you (and it has to be charged) at all times so you don’t miss this important SMS from your kid. You need time to sit in front of your computer or smartphone to open your email, Facebook or Twitter client. But what if you could choose a better way, a way to get this message in a perfectly convenient and non-intrusive way, even when you’re cooking, watching a movie or taking a shower?

This concept ties into an idea we had at ng Connect –  a unique set-up with the ability to send pictures or SMS to various home screens, such as digital photo frames or TV sets, that would be connected to the 3G network via a USB dongle. Since these devices are there already the reasoning was that they could be used to display messages in different locations in the house and in a non-intrusive way, not requiring any specific action on the receiving end.

The root idea is there, but the actual realization or product needs to make the difference by providing the experience that will trigger mass adoption. Forget about the digital photo frame, even forget about the connected bridge. Forget about 3G and look at 4G, VoLTE and newer. Imagine a simple device that you could carry with you everywhere at home and place at a location of your choice so it would project on any surface or as a hologram and play the communication intended for you how and where you want it.

Imagine an SMS message hanging in the air in front of you while you are cooking or a video playing on the shower door. I already hear those who would point me to the next generation of smartphones. They may have all the technology I am considering, but they will remain rich and high-end devices with too many options. I am looking at reinventing the answering machine with the same type of mass market adoption and price range where the toughest decisions are going to be where to put it and which direction it should face. Maybe it could be something like the connected mirror New York Times R&D Labs recently developed as a concept for receiving information.

Now this would be a perfect product for the digital middle class, people embracing new technology like they embraced cars. You turn the ignition key (or push the start button) and it works; you don’t have to download the windshield wipers for your car to function well in the rain. You’d still pay extra for leather seats though.

Imagine no more worries of cold pizzas, just friendly words hanging in the air. What do you think?

Vincent Weyl
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

Enthusiasm because it is great to see innovation at work and great to see the power of many when it comes to having better ideas, designing great prototypes and executing faster. In the EMEA region, any doubt that collaborative innovation is not only desirable but mandatory to thrive in the connected world has been lifted. Consequently the flow of new ideas and new members has never been so plentiful.

This sudden increase in popularity also raised some questions anew. What is the link between Alcatel-Lucent and ng Connect? What is the difference between an Innovation Center and a Gravity Center? What is the goal of the ng Connect Program? Who can join? What should a member company, Alcatel-Lucent included, expect from the program?

Let me briefly address the questions about ng Connect. The ng Connect Program is a collaborative innovation engine spanning multiple industries and looking to transform the user experience in various fields. This engine is powered by an ecosystem of companies (large and small), entrepreneurs, schools and even non-profit organizations, all acting as peers and on equal terms. It is this diversity of profiles and backgrounds that create original views and disruptive ideas.

Yet we cannot ignore and should not hide the prominent role played by Alcatel-Lucent, a founding member in this program. Alcatel-Lucent provides the program infrastructure and funds its operations, hosts most of the program’s permanent demo centers, lab platforms and collaboration spaces and, last but not least, supports the program with its global presence. Why? What’s the catch? Surely it is not just philanthropy. Well if you take two minutes to watch our CEO Ben Verwaayen’s video you will get the answer. If Alcatel-Lucent relies only on internal and Bell Labs innovations it will miss out on key opportunities, and in a constrained telecom industry, Alcatel-Lucent and our customers alike need all the innovation we can get and all the value we can derive from innovation, even if this may sometimes mean helping competitive solutions as well.

A great example of collaboration and innovative thinking in the form of  “co-opetition” is seen in Canada, where major wireless operators Bell Mobility and arch rival Telus combined forces to build a common wireless network across the second largest country (in terms of land mass) in the world… why?  Because it made sense. Did both benefit?  Yes, they are now announcing a cooperation around satellite TV delivery, so, collaboration, even between competitors can be win-win.

Alcatel-Lucent "plays the game by the rules" as do the other member companies, promoting our own capabilities and engaging other companies in collaborative projects where these capabilities can be monetized. Long time members may have noticed new faces at the recent member meetings, which are Alcatel-Lucent people representing various lines of business and who leverage the ng Connect engine to develop their own business. Examples include public safety, machine-to-machine or small cells. I see this as a great model and a welcome evolution, in that the ng Connect staff can concentrate on facilitation and the right people, who hold the ropes of technology and business decisions represent Alcatel-Lucent’s interest. This goes a long way in reducing some of the confusion.

There is more value today for the Program in staying within Alcatel-Lucent than trying to fly on its own wings. For this to work and to inspire the needed trust, we are aware that the ng Connect team needs to demonstrate great objectivity and great integrity and stand their ground to protect this cornerstone of the Program.  The team has the right level of experience, passion and professionalism to do just that.

Let me now come to the initial topic of this post: the ng Connect Gravity Center. We launched it in Europe on the day we opened the EMEA Innovation Center and another very successful Gravity Center already exists in Dallas, TX. There is some confusion about the two facilities that I will now attempt to dissipate.

We usually define innovation as the realization of novel ideas. In the ng Connect Program this translates into a workflow with three phases: ideation, development and implementation (deployment). An innovation center should offer resources to address all three of them. It is the case in Paris, where the Creativ’Lab run by Bell Labs is dedicated to ideation and the Corporate Executive Briefing Center is a place to showcase and demonstrate working concepts to customers (to commercialize said solutions). The ng Connect Gravity Center completes the picture by offering a collaboration environment to people from different companies to develop and work on their joint project in a single physical location.

The Gravity Center in Villarceaux provides workstations for development with access to live physical platforms and remote access to virtual labs and obviously internet resources. It includes a meeting room equipped with conferencing and remote collaboration for project reviews and discussions, and a space dedicated to project presentations and fast pitches with the idea to create proximity between presenters and their audience. In our Plano location we also have a number of small start-ups and entrepreneurs who are just getting their companies off the ground.  You can see the latest list of residents here: http://gravitycentredallas.com/about/startup-residents/ Lastly the Gravity Center offers amenities, places to relax, and generally an atmosphere favoring teamwork and development.

The term Gravity Center was coined just weeks before the opening the Dallas facility. It immediately sounded appropriate. Gravity, in this context, is defined as the force that attracts talented people across the region and gets them together to innovate. Gravity as in center of gravity (or center of mass) which converges different innovation entities in a central location in EMEA is Alcatel-Lucent and specifically, Bell Labs, an already active basin of innovation in France. The center of gravity is also the point of equilibrium between ideas and opportunities – that’s ng Connect, the initiative that enables the right balance and allows members to move at a fast pace, prototyping, developing and delivering new solutions.

We are very thrilled with both ng Connect Gravity Centers. As I write these lines development of some of the latest service concept ideas is just starting in there. Come and join us for a really different, co-located, collaboration experience.

Vincent Weyl
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

As someone who’s in the telecommunications business and attends typical telecom related events, my attendance at NARM’s convention was a unique experience.  One aspect that was particularly striking was the “year in review” where key subject matter experts talked about how the industry has fared over time, and for someone who hasn’t really looked at this in-depth, what stood out to me was the diversity in how music is now delivered as a result of digitalization.  Whether you buy it through an online store such as Amazon’s MP3 Music Store or have music streamed to you via Pandora or Spotify, you can probably find a channel that suits your needs.

More recently, the ng Connect Program worked with NARM and the NPD Group on a research report related to music listening and consumption habits, especially as it relates to having music delivered to you via the cloud.

To date, not many have really analyzed these new services, and people’s general interest in music in the cloud and the potential for this new trend.  But with the release of our findings, we hope to provide some insight in the minds of those who listen to music.  In particular, I want to focus on music discovery through cloud services.

Graph 2

Graph 1

Graph 4

Graph 3

I’m excited that NARM has joined ng Connect.  It’s through collaborations like this that the Program has been able to be a key influencer and mover of various industries.  I’m looking forward to not only what comes out next in our engagement with NARM, but also the collaborations that are taking place with our 80+ Members.

Daniel Chui
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

Using their own smartphones, fans can video stream the event via the cloud to an event editor who will select which fan video to show on one large screen at the venue. For this big screen experience, called Fan Hot Picks, each video will be published and managed through a content delivery network (CDN). Key to the success of any major event, advertising can also have a play because ads can be featured on the Fan Hot Picks screen or on the consumer’s phone when they activate the Fan Cam app.

In addition to the Fan Hot Picks screen, there could be a second screen at the venue that can show editorial content from a news organization – such as Agence France Presse. AFP, an ng Connect Program member, worked with Alcatel-Lucent to demonstrate the types of content that could be live streamed during these events.

And the fun doesn’t end with the game or concert! After the game, fans can purchase the Fan Hot Picks video or be entered to win prizes for participating in the experience.

The Fan Cam allows fans to have a richer, more personalized and community-driven experience at events that will increase customer satisfaction. And now advertisers will have a new opportunity to reach customers.

The Fan Cam is a new service concept developed by Alcatel-Lucent with member contributions, including AFP, as a part of the ng Connect Program and unveiled today at 4G World. Come by the Alcatel-Lucent Booth #1407 where it will be demonstrated for the first time.

Jason Collins
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

To give credit to the event organizers, close to one thousand registered attendees showed up representing various fields and branches of the ICT industry. So what was this event all about and how was it different? Well, this is what really struck me: it was not different. A dozen or so exhibitor booths with sporadic activity, the usual press and gold sponsor lounges and even the now customary developer corner, a testimony of this industry trying too hard to demonstrate it is agile and appealing to young talent.

The conference themes and the breakouts were also known territory, with plenty of space occupied by machine-to-machine. People continuing to wonder at the staggering yet meaningless figure of 50+ billion devices or things connected to a global network in the coming decade. Professionals continuing to paint “a day in the life of <insert name of your choice>.” as if people’s lives could somehow be scripted to conveniently demonstrate a need for these technologies and services.

As you may have figured by now, I am not a fan of this approach nor am I a great fan of the machine-to-machine techno-trend. Yes, as connectivity becomes a commodity it is a natural evolution to apply it to about any item one can think of. Yes, this will create new requirements on the network. And yes, this industry will identify them, solve them and standardize new technologies. We are good at that.

But I am still left hungering for a broader purpose. I still feel like I am back in the days when we deployed high capacity networks with absolutely no idea what would drive traffic and leave powerful installations un- or underused. I haven’t heard a credible tale of what a world in which the M2M capabilities would be fully leveraged would look like. What is it that is going to shape our lives and our societies in the same way mobile telephony and internet did?

 by Clyde Bentley

I was there thirty years ago when we did not have mobile phones or internet. Remember those pagers? Apple was just entering the personal computer market and the founders of Facebook were not even with us yet. Can you imagine your life today without internet or a mobile phone? I bet that it will be equally hard, fifteen years from now, to imagine life without ubiquitous connectivity of all things. But what will be tomorrow’s Google, Apple or Facebook? Who will be these visionary companies, equally skilled in execution, that will imagine and implement the next “universe experience”?

The point I am trying to make here is that it seems that the biggest innovations in the telecom world have been brought about by individual companies taking the spotlight and the lion’s share, even if and when they relied on third parties or ecosystems to fuel their innovations. One of the highlights of my day at Communication World was a conversation with a representative of the Fraunhofer Institute. What started as a brief discussion on ng Connect and other innovation ecosystems turned into a philosophical debate on the actual possibility of collaborative innovation. The recent history depicted above seems to indicate otherwise.Man is by nature aggressive: if left with our basic instincts we are more inclined to fight than to cooperate with our neighbor. Yet over time we have acquired reason, learned to live in communities and designed laws for a collective governance. We managed to build cathedrals and grand monuments everywhere on the globe and to send some of our kind to the moon. Mankind achieved great things through cooperation.

Now if we look on smaller scales – states or companies or departments within companies – what do we observe? Rampant competition, not for survival but for furtherance of individual interests. Even though they are close neighbors and inseparable partners in a Europe in the making, individual countries cannot agree on joint initiatives to fight such a formidable crisis as the sovereign debt crisis. Even though ng Connect is as open a program as there is, I found it hard to come to agreement on its terms and conditions with companies that would only stand to gain from it, Even though their competitors are not represented and as their product and technology are clearly adjacent and relevant to the work being done within the program. And within the same companies, departments sometimes fight a fierce battle vying for the same budget envelope and co-workers within the same team fight and compete openly or worse, covertly, to get the next promotion. Even in such clear-cut contexts, collaboration is not a given. It requires a conscious effort and a common goal to drive for the greater good.

Within ng Connect, and based on our view of the global technology landscape, we often claim that no one company can invent the next generation user experience alone. This does not automatically imply however that said generation will be the result of the collaborative approach of an ecosystem of peer companies. And doing something is much preferred to doing nothing and as noted above, collaboration can result in profound achievements. There is still a lot of work and effort required to get to that point. But we are engaged on that path. Our grand design is to setup, organize and improve an ecosystem governance and innovation program where all companies can work towards this greater objective while driving benefits for themselves.

No one company can do it alone. Yes. But can multiple companies do it together, as a global team? This is what the coming decade will tell us and the question I brought back from my trip to Munich.

Vincent Weyl
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

One topic took a substantial part of the hour and it was triggered by a gentleman who was formerly with one of the big UK operators. He pointed out that one of the biggest M2M applications, Smart Metering, had an unclear business case, and because of this he felt network operators would be unlikely to move forward.

by Rghrous

We debated this a little, and my view was that this could be missing the point. Once you have developed a robust M2M capability with a High Leverage Network and device management, application lifecycle management and API management, what could you do with it? Smart Metering is just the visible part of an as yet unimagined applications “iceberg” that could bring many new revenue streams to the operator.

Take the example of one Alcatel-Lucent customer, EPB Chattanooga. This is a utility player who decided that in order to bolster the business case for Smart Metering they would take a different approach. They decided to deploy a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network upon which they would provide not only Smart Metering but other higher value broadband services such as triple play into the household. The city of Chattanooga now boasts one of the fastest broadband networks in the US. Households now have access to many new services via the city’s power provider, which means more revenue to support the original business case and take maximum advantage of the capability being developed.

This may not be a pure M2M example but I think it illustrates the thinking. Don’t focus on developing an M2M capability for one or a few applications; instead imagine what could happen if you expose this capability to a collaborative innovation ecosystem such as ng Connect.  What new applications can you imagine?

In the same way that nobody could predict the wave of smartphone apps we have seen over the last few years, I believe with the basic ingredients of a network capability, a plethora of connected device endpoints and the ability to expose all of this via APIs to a vibrant ecosystem of developers, the same thing can happen in M2M. And by doing this we will be taking a big step towards the Smart City dream of safer, greener, healthier and more productive lives, helping us to realize the potential of a connected society.

Rob Parkes
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

Some speakers that stood out included Brian Wong, founder of Kiip, one of the youngest entrepreneurs ever to be funded by a venture capital firm (when Brian was just 19 years old). His current mission is to bridge the gap between the worlds of gaming and mobile networks. As founder of kiip.me, he is finding new ways to create revenue streams for the gaming industry. Another standout was Munjal Shah, founder of Like.com which was recently acquired by Google. He now is the General Manager of Google Boutiques, where he runs the soft goods team (which recently launched boutiques.com). He is passionate about creating the best fashion and luxury shopping experience in the world.

The trends we’ve seen through ng Connect were aligned with the presentations and panel discussions, which centered on the fact that technology is no longer a barrier for us to develop services. Today, the sky’s the limit. And it’s no longer the barrier for users consuming services with mobile handset devices becoming more and more powerful. The emerging trends now are not connecting to the network, but “connecting you to your network" and “experience ubiquity,” a personalized way of connecting consumers with their social networks through devices and technology.

Below are some highlights from the conference courtesy of Victoria Lennox.

• The millennial generation entrepreneurs who grew up with technology will create lean businesses that are in the cloud, transparent, social and authentic (Debbie Landa, DealMaker Media).
• In the past businesses where focused on location and now they’ve shifted to focusing on attention (Debbie Landa, DealMaker Media).
• The leverage needed to accelerate business has shifted from financial leverage to social leverage (Howard Lindszon, StockTwits).
• An innovative startup’s failure should be embraced (failure is worn like a badge of honor in Silicon Valley), when pursuing a business opportunity chose something you are passionate about. If you fail you’ll develop domain expertise. (Howard Lindszon, StockTwits).
• We need to build a strong ecosystem for entrepreneurs in Canada, foster a culture of entrepreneurship and create a strong unified Canadian corporate brand (Senia Rapisarda VP, BDC).

Recommendations for Next Gen entrepreneurs:

• Grow wings while you fall. You don’t go with the flow when you want to start a revolution, stand up for your ideas. Think big and build relationships” (Brian Wong, Kiip).
• “Keep your revenue models simple and be conscious of asymmetric versus symmetric business models. Understanding your revenue model is important and focus on revenue immediately” (Munjal Shah, Google Boutiques).
• “Think big, build and inspire great teams and celebrate failure. The mobile marketplace is happening right now, help close the gap between digital advertising and the physical stores” (Chris O’Neill, Google Canada).
•  “Mobile is driving the global entrepreneur and most of the growth is happening in emerging markets with youth” (Rick Witham, Nokia)
• “Technology is useful, but it really is about ecosystems and how well you are connected with them” (Derek McMullen, PayPal)

Some of my takeaways for ng Connect were that we are positioned to achieve great success through our multi-industry ecosystem that gives us visibility into all parts of the digital value chain.

The overall consensus at the conference was that a new measurement of success has emerged which is directly correlated to social commerce and experience ubiquity. If companies can demonstrate demand generation while supporting simple and pragmatic symmetric/asymmetric revenue models, they will reap the rewards of top line growth. Ecosystems have become increasingly important in order to grow your network and understand how your business impacts others within the value chain and vice versa.

Adam Stratas
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

I had one of these moments just over a month ago, as I was flying to Dallas for an ideation session. I do fly regularly with Air France but there was no way to reach Dallas from Strasbourg in less than three hops. So I flew KLM, which is in fact still the same company.

And the unexpected happened. Each seat, including in coach, was equipped with power plugs! Great! When you brace yourself for a ten hour flight you fully expect your smartphone and tablet to run out of juice at some point. But none of that. As weird as it may sound, I felt grateful and this simple fact changed my entire flight experience. I found myself enjoying the food, the movies and even my neighbors. I remember offering some homemade madeleines to a little elderly lady crunched up in the seat next to me.

There are many lessons to be learned here. The first, most important and most obvious one is that customer satisfaction comes from great customer experience. Customer service, customer care and customer support are all very nice and as necessary in every company as firemen in every big city. But when they do not add to an already bad customer experience, they do little to improve it. Even firemen will tell you today that they are not primarily looking at new techniques to extinguish fires or reduce intervention time on car accidents. They leave that to academics or specialized companies. Their priority today is how to improve prevention and readiness i.e. how to make people better prepared to deal with any hazard.

Which brings us to the second lesson: focusing on people and user experience is better than focusing on technology. Great user experience doesn’t necessarily require development of sophisticated and groundbreaking systems, products or applications. It may be as simple as in my example, offering an existing and well known service in a different context. It may be as simple as adding wheels to suitcases. It often looks so obvious one wonders why it took so long for it to be broadly adopted.

The last lesson is for every one of us out there trying to spur innovation in our line of work. Keep your eyes open and your mind curious at all times as you cannot predict when, where or from whom you will learn, understand or discover products, contents or people that will help you make significant advances. During our last Member event, which featured the opening of our EMEA Innovation Center near Paris (picture), Ben Verwaayen the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent reflected on this. He stated that people in the telecom industry thought they had "the stone of wisdom" and that they knew it all: "they did something and it was good for the world". Now this industry is left with the daunting task of reinventing a business model and a value proposition to catch up with leaders in user experience such as Apple, Google or Amazon.

I like to blog about ng Connect. I usually follow a simple process. I reflect on recent experiences, readings or thoughts and look at how they relate to the ng Connect Program.

In this instance let us consider the three lessons above.

It is ng Connect’s very ambition to transform the user experience in the connected world of tomorrow. The purpose of the program is not to develop new products or new technology. This may come as a side effect. The purpose is to improve user experience, solve customer problems, alleviate end-user pains in various industries and market segments – and to do it much more quickly by engaging the whole value chain right from the start. For members like Alcatel-Lucent who are not faced with end customers, this means putting their products and technologies in context so that companies or organizations dealing with end users can deliver better services and deliver them faster. However since said members do not have a direct contact with, and therefore understanding of, the end customers it is important they collaborate with service providers (e.g. network operators, cities, utility or transportation companies, etc.) from the design to the implementation of innovative services.

"Innovation is about people". If there was one key takeaway from Ben Verwaayen’s keynote about ng Connect, this is it. ng Connect is first and foremost a gathering of like-minded people, all from different backgrounds, looking to do some good things for other people by leveraging their know-how and capabilities with the goal of profitable initiatives for their companies. In a previous post I commented about trust and how it is a key ingredient to successful innovation. I also added that no matter how detailed an agreement is between two organizations to try to cement a collaboration, it will never replace the mutual, personal understanding of the people signing it. Innovation is about people and trust is what fuels it. ng Connect, better than any ecosystem I know, offers this trusted environment.

Our last member meeting, that took place in Paris last week, featured a tour of the Stade de France, the largest stadium in France with over 80,000 seat capacity. Now people like me coming from the ICT industry were expecting cool communication features or great audio and video surveillance systems. Yet, believe it or not, sending and receiving SMS during events can still be an issue, let alone getting data connectivity. On the other hand some aspects of the Stade de France completely caught us by surprise, such as its architecture.

The field is 11m below ground which allows each of the three levels to have separate access. The whole stadium can be emptied in just 7 minutes. The lower stands can be retracted, lowering the capacity by 5000, but fully uncovering the track for athletics meetings. By the way, this system is patented. The roof, which weighs 1.5 times more than the Eiffel tower, extends to a glass cover which filters UV, reds and infrareds while letting the green and blue lights through since it is needed to grow the grass. Clearly there were a lot of innovations put into this stadium which is just over 10 year old. It was interesting to see how it captivated the interest of the ng Connect audience. There was no better example for me to illustrate the third lesson and no better demonstration that our ng Connect membership "gets it".

So is the ng Connect Program applying the principles I described: focus on user experience as a goal, on people as the key success factor and on open minds as the catalyst? My answer of course is yes and I can conclude by echoing Ben Verwaayen’s closing sentence about ng Connect: "we are very happy with it!"

Vincent Weyl
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com

• Creativ’lab of Bell Labs to develop new ideas and technologies for Alcatel-Lucent that can also be utilized by ng Connect members
• The Executive Briefing Center where ng Connect service concepts will be on display to show all the capabilities next generation technologies are bringing to the consumers of tomorrow, as well as the business models that could support them
• The Gravity Center, a new accelerator founded by Alcatel-Lucent to help spur innovation within the start-up and university community in the metro Paris areas. The Gravity Center will attract small companies, entrepreneurs and universities can work together and individual companies can join the ng Connect Program as a member company. With their membership, they can also be a part of service concept development and linked to various labs and platforms in the region that will have a home base at the Gravity Center. ng Connect is proud to lead these Gravity Centers and work with these companies to drive the technologies of tomorrow.

ng Connect has seen some great growth in the development of exciting new service concepts to our membership to the general innovation that has come, and continues to come from the program. At today’s launch of the EMEA Innovation Center, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, kicked things off and stated:

“True innovation is between people. It’s bringing customers in, it’s bringing competitors in, it’s bringing people from different industries in an early stage. That exchange of views, that capability to think very out of the box is what drives this industry. Our customers, our competitors, ourselves, we are all motivated by one thing – making something that is completely different than what we had in the past. To have that ability to do better, faster, more intelligent and do it together is the concept of ng Connect. We are very happy with it.”

Through ng Connect we demonstrated the full potential of LTE technology and its relevance in areas where it is not expected, such as the automotive industry or public entertainment. LTE was just the beginning but an important one because it was a pivot point for the industry, bringing true broadband and enhanced QoS to mobile networks – it is a technology that enables other members of the value chain to actually realize and enhance their own product and service innovation strategies. 

LTE was just the tip of the iceberg, we look forward to diving deeper by conquering other next generation technologies and showing the advantages a powerful ecosystem like ng Connect can bring to the table. And this Innovation Center is just the stepping stone we need to get there.  When you are next in Villarceaux, please let us know and we can give you a tour.

Vincent Weyl
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel-lucent.com