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Innovation in action – helping transform the future

Innovative ways to harness the power of collaboration to drive the innovation agenda.

Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2020

Ettienne Reinecke, chief technology officer, NTT, says the spirit of innovation is at the heart of modern organisations, because organisations want to differentiate themselves by creating a culture of innovation that permeates every part of their organisation.

Reinecke adds that clients expect technology solutions that solve their business challenges, help them create and deliver their innovation agenda and drive strategic and transformational business outcomes through emerging and disruptive technologies.

Therefore, innovation has become a top priority for organisations as they fend off several challenges. "New and emerging technologies, along with disruptive business models, mean companies either have to move fast and adapt, or suffer the consequences."

But organisations are finding that executing on their innovation agenda is easier said than done, especially without the right partner. The right partner is one with the right skills, and the processes in place to deliver customer value faster. And only then will organisations be able to achieve the business outcomes they desire, at the speed they need.

Using the strength of NTT's global reach

Through the open innovation framework, NTT can connect people, partners, and clients, and the work being done by the R&D teams, to drive operational and digital transformation for its clients and to deliver business value faster. IT embraces its collective power to challenge the norm, improve the existing and invent the future.

The open innovation framework is made up of its internal InnerSourcing programme and its external Co-innovation programme.

Innovation starts from the inside, which is why NTT has to innovate internally first through collaboration to drive transformation before it can help other businesses transform. This is why its called InnerSourcing – innovation through collaboration.

"Co-innovation is an initiative where we innovate together with our clients, partners and third parties, to solve business challenges through the use of disruptive and innovative technology, invent new solutions and create differentiation from competitors. Co-innovation is ‘innovation in partnership’."

Tapping into our talent pool

NTT's InnerSourcing is the adoption of open source community culture, tools and practices to drive innovation and connect talent across all of NTT. This allows it to leverage its global talent pool, tapping into the skills of more than 40 000 employees.

"InnerSourcing originated with the idea that we needed a shared code repository, allowing us to take the great work that’s already been done internally across the business and leverage it for the benefit of all our clients." Reinecke adds: "We created an open source approach to innovation, working openly, delivering outcomes locally, leveraging and contributing globally and developing new skills as individuals and teams."

Some of the innovations include see-through, flexible, rechargeable battery prototype with potential applications in wearables and the Internet of things. This has resulted in more than 5 200 pieces of intellectual property being captured through this programme, with more than 3 300 people contributing.

"This initiative allows us to pitch particular business challenges to the entire organisation, encouraging our people to form teams and come up with new ways to improve our clients’ business."

And had NTT stuck to the traditional method of developing solutions, it would have been limited by the time and resources allocated to that project. However, with InnerSourcing, NTT can give its clients access to an expanded pool of resources focused almost entirely on driving innovation.

Revolutionising pro cycling

By using its combined expertise and through the partnership with Tour de France organisers, Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), NTT used innovation to deliver on ASO's desire to continuously improve the level of fan engagement with the race – to embrace the shift to a hyperconnected world, and to make use of it to revolutionise how fans engage with the event.

To generate the widest scope of ideas, NTT runs an annual hackathon – Le Code to France – where teams from all business functions across the world come together and pitch ideas to be implemented in the Tour de France solution.

The power of co-innovation

InnerSourcing is just one pillar of NTT's open innovation framework. The other, equally important, pillar is the Co-innovation initiative. Co-innovation emphasises co-operation externally with its clients, partners and other companies within the NTT Group to tackle specific business challenges.

The objective of this kind of engagement is to help organisations establish their innovation roadmap, accelerating operational and digital transformation and disrupting existing business models. "We use an innovation objective framework to help our clients prioritise their different focus areas, examining their operational and digital transformation objectives and their place within their innovation roadmap."

To support this, NTT has created a global network of client innovation centres designed to help enable and initiate these co-innovation engagements, creating an immersive experience resulting in the development of a co-innovation roadmap for our clients’ future business and digital transformation goals.

Joint innovation is a new way of working together, as both companies provide resources and funding and work together to solve business and/or operational challenges. It’s not simply a professional services engagement; both parties are putting skin into the game.

Together with the City of Las Vegas, NTT is creating the foundations of an intelligent city, working with the city to use data to create a more secure environment for all their residents.

With Cisco, NTT is using blockchain to address regulatory compliance and cyber crime challenges, by enabling clients to validate whether network configurations pushed to devices in their environment are compliant, improve detection, using blockchain cryptography protocols, changes to and/or tampering of configurations in the network.

Working together to innovate

NTT's InnerSourcing and Co-innovation programmes are the key pillars of the open innovation framework and enable it to execute on innovation agenda and strategy, as well as change the way clients to innovate.

Whether it’s working closely together with clients or partners to solve specific business challenges or tapping into the depth of resources, NTT can accelerate the way organisations innovate and ultimately empower its clients to differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets.

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