TMFC15493 - Innovation - The trillion dollar question.pdf

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THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION

QUICK INSIGHTS

INNOVATION

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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION

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INNOVATION:

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Page 4 Executive summary

Page 6 Section 1

A question of culture

Page 9 Section 2

How can service providers innovate?

Page 13 Section 3

General principles of innovation



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This Quick Insights report was inspired by

the diverse and animated T8 debate between

more than 30 top communications industry

executives held at TM Forum’s Management

World 2011 in Dublin in May. There was

general agreement that change is necessary

and urgent, and that innovation is the key.

This was underlined in a report published

at the beginning of June 2011 by Juniper

Research. It stated that revenues billed by

operators will be more than $1 trillion annually

by 2016, but that mobile network operators’

costs will exceed revenues within four years

unless they take action.

Against this background of soaring costs,

we are moving into a new era. “Users will

want any type of information at any time on

any device they choose, sometimes while

doing 140km [almost 90 miles] an hour on the

autobahn or freeway – it’s our job as engineers

and technologists to be ingenious and figure

out how we are going to enable this,” was how

the CTO of one of the world’s largest telecoms

groups put it. No doubt the speaker’s CFO is

equally exercised about how they are going to

make a sustainable profit from doing it.

This report seeks to look at barriers that are

preventing progress, present some different

approaches to this trillion-dollar question, andcover some general principles of innovation.

Section 1 looks at barriers to innovation

within operators. These are largely due to

corporate culture, which, since the financial

crisis that started in 2008, appears to have

become conservative and inward looking.

The emphasis seems to be on ‘keeping your

head down’ rather than doing anything to

draw unwanted attention to oneself by putting

forward ideas that run contrary to day-to-day

operations or corporate trends.

Grand corporate plans and the boardroom

are rarely the birthplaces of innovation,

but if properly run, they should provide an

environment in which innovation is possible

and nurtured. Ideas that are massively

successful are often incidental or accidental, or

just plain lucky, and timing is all.

Don’t worry that you don’t know exactly

what you’re looking for, just have the wits

to recognize the possibilities of a good idea

when you see one and the courage to try it

out. In particular, realize that putting out ‘work

in progress’ is a great idea. Google+ is a great

example – you’ll never get a bigger lab than the

outside world or better feedback than from the

general public. It might not be polite or what

you were expecting, but that doesn’t matter.

A great example of user feedback spawning

a massively successful business is how one

of the world’s largest payments-handling

companies grew out of a single-currency,

premature, e-commerce initiative after it

became clear from early-adopter, overseas

users (who were not even the intended

audience) that there was huge demand for

a cross-currency processing facility. As one

financial services industry veteran observed

wryly, any of the banks “could have set up

such a service on a single PC” at that timein the mid-1990s, “but they didn’t because

they were institutionally unable to grasp the

opportunity – and promptly lost out on a

multi-billion dollar market.”

Failure can be positive, if handled in the right

way (fail small, fail quickly and learn well) and

not knowing exactly what you are looking for

is fine. These notions are supported by two

powerful books published in the last year by

heavy-hitting economists John Kay and Tim

Harwood. After all, SMS and prepay are great

Executive summary





The biggest message that came out of the T8’s

lively discussion at TM Forum’s Management

World 2011 on Breaking the innovation barrier

is the urgent need for innovation within service

providers to enable new services and revenue

streams.

The urgency was underlined by Juniper

Research’s* findings published the week after

the T8 meeting. It stated that revenues billed by

operators will be more than $1 trillion annually

by 2016, but that mobile network operators

face a ‘nightmare scenario’ whereby their costs

will be greater than revenues within four years

unless they take action.

Against this backdrop of soaring costs, other

tough challenges must be faced, such as users

wanting any type of information, at any time, on

any device. Operators need to enable this, but

also make a sustainable profit.

Clearly there are no simple answers to this

trillion-dollar question of how service providers

can become more innovative; the upside is

there is no shortage of ideas either. To some

extent, they are all affected by the corporate

culture of network operators, which is typically

conservative.

The web has changed our perceptions and

values so much – as consumers of all kinds

of web services, in the mid-1990s, we quicklylearned that ‘best effort’ services were perfectly

acceptable when they were free to the user. The

same still applies: We realize that cheap or free

apps might not work perfectly, but who cares?

They’re fun or useful (or they’re not and we

dump them immediately) and we’ll be moving

onto the something else next week anyway.

Almost all search results make money for

someone, somewhere (just how finely tuned

this business has become since search became

personalized at the end of 2009 is spelled out

in a jaw-dropping book, The Filter Bubble: What

the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser,

published in May 2011), but most of us don’t

care so long as we find what we thought we

were looking for, or at least are happy with what

is served up to us.

Although this process of shifting acceptance

has been going on for over a decade, on the

whole, network operators continue to behave

as though it hasn’t happened. For example, we

should be prepared to launch imperfect products

into the outside world, stating that they are

work in progress, then invite feedback from

users, as Google has with Google+ in July 2011,

in a bid to compete against Facebook. Google’s

attitude is, ‘this is work in progress, tell us what

we can do and what you’d like to see’: You can’t

get a bigger lab than the outside world, nor a

bigger sample of public opinion.

Feedback from users might not be polite

or what you were expecting, but it will be

instructive if you can take the information

onboard. This is difficult for operators with their

heritage of five nines’ reliability, and typically an

inward-looking monoculture.

Yet the rewards of acting on such feedback

can be huge. A great example of this is that

one of the world’s largest payments-handling

companies grew out of a single-currency,premature, e-commerce initiative after it

became clear from early-adopter, overseas users

(who were not even the intended audience) that

there was huge demand for a cross-currency

processing facility. As one financial services

industry veteran observed wryly, any of the

banks “could have set up such a service on a

single PC” at that time in the mid-1990s, “but

they didn’t because they were institutionally

unable to grasp the opportunity – and promptly

lost out on a multi-billion dollar market.”

A question of culture

Section 1




Communication with and from

the highest level is very important

Part of that institutionalized resistance to

change or innovation is the work ethic across

service providers’ workforces, which tends to

be ‘keep your head down’ and do what you’re

told, rather than put new ideas forward. The

thinking is that it’s better not to be a tall poppy,

they are always the ones to get their heads

lopped off: don’t go against the wishes and

instructions of your line manager or the trends

in corporate thinking, in the interests of hanging

onto your job.

Indeed those at the coal-face, staff dealing with

customers all day every day, don’t necessarily

have any idea what the corporate thinking on

any given line of business is because of a lack of

communication, leadership and direction.

In contrast, it is interesting that the

heads of the most successful companies in

communications – such as the top guns at

Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on

– are household names. This is not the case

with the most senior executives at network

operators, even though without them and the

infrastructure and services provided by their

companies, none of the rest could have been so

innovative or successful.

Communication with and from the highest

level is very important. If a complaint or positive

feedback has to travel through 14 layers of

management before it hits the CEO, the

organization is heading for big trouble. Yet many

network operators’ management structure

is hierarchical, without a mechanism for vital

information, such as what customers think,

to be fed to those who have the power todo something about it. Instead, people with

original ideas are often viewed as upstarts

and trouble-makers.

TM Forum’s Rob Rich, Managing Director

of our Insights Research unit and customer

experience guru, was only partly joking when

he recently quipped, “Why aren’t we seeing

operators appoint Chief Customer Officers?”.

It’s a great question. He added, “The more

stove pipes you have, the more you need one.”

It turns out he’s not the only one thinking along

these lines – just as this report went to press on

July 7, Telstra announced it had done just that –

see Section 2 for more details.

Innovation does not usually arise from grand

plans or board meetings, anything but. It’s often

incidental or accidental or just plain lucky, and

timing is all. The point is not to worry that you

don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, just

have the wits to recognize the possibilities of

a good idea when you see one and have the

courage to try it out.

This is illustrated over and over again in two

highly readable, but learned books by a pair of

economists: Obliquity: Why our goals are best

achieved indirectly by John Kay of the Financial

Times , published in 2010, and Tim Harwood’s

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure ,

published in May 2011.

Kay argues that the direct, grand plan

approach is generally doomed to failure because

the types of problems the human race is

struggling with – whether military, economic,

environmental or commercial, among others –

are too complex to model accurately. This leads

to inaccurate abstraction, the very opposite of

intuition, feel and insight. Yet the latter are what

operators need if they are to launch rafts of new

services to please and attract customers and

bring the sustainably profitable, new revenue

streams they so desire and need.

Kay wheels out many highly lucid and

entertaining arguments to support his theory

that any organization whose overwhelming goal

is to make money at all costs will fail. In the

last three years, the banking world is notshort of examples.

To adapt his line of thought to the question in

hand here – how network operators can become

more innovative – we should start with how we

can make our customers happy and appeal to

new ones, so that they stay with us and spend

more money. That is giving them what they

want, when they want it at an affordable price

by thinking about them first, rather than being

bound by the dictates of corporate culture and

heritage, and its inherent fear of failure.

“Innovation does not

usually arise from

grand plans or board

meetings, anything but.

It’s often incidental or

accidental or just plain

lucky, and timing is all.”





The key here is to be prepared to fail and

often, but fail small-scale, fail fast, learn from

it and move on, which is a very different

attitude to the one that has prevailed in our

industry. There is a long list of high-profile

marketing initiatives that have failed, slowly and

expensively, in the quest to come up with ‘killer

applications’ because they were out of step with

what users wanted, highlighting the dangers of

an inward-looking culture.

Or, as Harwood explains with great clarity

in his book, fear of failure paradoxically often

leads to greater and more dangerous failures.

Rather the key to success is an ability to adapt,

improvise and accept mistakes.

One T8 attendee advised that before spending

millions on a marketing campaign, “do internal

testing, if it doesn’t gain traction in-house, it

won’t succeed in the outside world, so start

something else.”

Not that innovative ideas necessarily have to

be home-grown. They don’t. Often they come

from small, nimble start-ups that we should

recognize as being potential partners. Service

providers have the reach, scale, infrastructure

and associated systems and functions (such as

billing and security measures) these small, new

players need to get out there.

Innovation is about the way we use and

monetize these unrivaled assets to deliver value

to customers fast. We need to be much, much

more receptive to new partners – rather than

seeing them as a commercial threat or invadersof our long-established systems and processes.

To ensure we don’t suffer ‘organ rejection’ –

that is reject anything that didn’t originate with

us – we need to figure out how best to enable

their ideas, please our customers and ultimately

make a profit for all parties.

Yet operators could be making much more

progress on the partnership front. Part of the

problem is that it is the norm in the industry to

award CxO level personnel multi-million dollar

bonuses for short-term results, rather than for

their plans for where the service provider will

be in 10 years’ time. Certainly it is easier to

continue to do what we’ve always done than

move out of our comfort zone, but that move

is inevitable.

As well as having to work with partners

to gain access to sustainable new revenue

streams, the industry will be obliged to work

more closely with partners that it considers

rivals in other circumstances. For example,

enabling partners that compete with your

own retail chain to use your network to act

as a mobile virtual network operator. This is

happening in some countries already.

We will also be obligated, to a greater or

lesser extent, “to get used to sharing a base

station tower and other infrastructure with

your enemy.” We need to start thinking the

unthinkable, as other industries have already

been forced to do.

In the airline industry, it used to be

unthinkable that an airline wouldn’t own its own

fleet of aircraft, and after that it was unthinkable

that it didn’t maintain its own aircraft, nowadays

it only ‘owns’ the pilots and frontline staff.

That’s it.

The world has changed, and we have to

change with it. The good news is that we can.

There are lots and lots of options. It’s worth

remembering that not so very long ago, Apple

looked to be in grave danger of extinction. It

went on to reshape the music business, alter

the mobile landscape beyond recognition andchange the face of the personal computer.

In the next section we look at a range of

different approaches to the question of how

service providers can embrace innovation.

* http://juniperresearch.com/viewpressrelease.

php?pr=245


http://juniperresearch.com/viewpressrelease.php?pr=245








“Another approach is to

make the most of the

talents and motivation of

the ‘awkward squad’ –

those worrisome people

with ideas – by setting

up a largely separate

incubator or subsidiary.”

cry in our beer about. I do think that services

like Google and other over-the-top (OTT)

services create demand for the underlying

capabilities. If those underlying capabilities

are merely moving the bit around, we’ll see

that big squeeze. The question is what other

underlying capabilities are there, that we can

do better at scale that those OTT players can’t

and will pay us to do for them? Authentication

and identity is a prime example, there are

others too.

How can I look to work with those OTT

players? I don’t care where the traffic comes

from, I just want more of it to fill my pipes.

If you expand that thinking, as most of our

economy moves to a digital base over the next

five to 10 years, all those capabilities – not

just moving bits, but all those transactions

– all those customer relationships, all those

identification and authentication pieces, if you

only took a fraction of a penny for each of

them, you’d be a very rich company, hoping

and praying for more Googles to come along,

because they would create more traffic for you.

The incubator route

Another approach is to make the most of

the talents and motivation of the ‘awkward

squad’ – those worrisome people with ideas

– by sett ing up a largely separate incubator

or subsidiary that protects them and their

ideas from the constraints of the parent

organization’s potentially stifling culture. Thisis a route recommended by Tim Harwood,

author of the just published book, Adapt: Why

Success Always Starts with Failure.

One large operator has successfully deployed

a leadership development program whereby

each year, 25 of the most promising young

workers are chosen to spend 10 months

overseas, full-time, on a management course,

working within operators in the U.S. They then

return to their employer and apply what they

have learned.

Managers are not allowed to stop their staff

from applying for a position on the program, and

so far it has been very successful, with more

than 150 people having completed it. A key part

of this is ensuring that when they return to the

company, they are integrated fully with it and

their fellow employees, rather allowing an elite,

separate ‘club’ to form, causing resentment and

resistance among colleagues.

Strong leadership is an essential ingredient

to ensure that an incubator approach and/or

applying knowledge from an external source

(such as the overseas assignments) within an

organization are successful.

The perception is that there are too many

managers and not enough leadership. Service

providers need a strong person at the head

of the company to support these disruptive

practices and processes, preferably one whose

chief concern is not finance, which is exactly

what Telstra has just announced (see next

paragraph).

Putting the customer first, institutionally

As reported in The Sydney Morning Herald on

July 7, as part of its transformation process,

Australia’s biggest operator, Telstra, “has

brought all staff dealing directly with customers

into one division and reduced the number

of managing directors who report directly to

the chief executive, as it shifts away from its

engineering and network functions.

“Consumer, government and businesscustomers will be the responsibility of a single

sales and service division, headed by recent

recruit Gordon Ballantyne, who also assumes

the title of chief customer officer.”

This is part of Telstra CEO David Thodey’s

plan to focus more on marketing and new

digital businesses. This is definitely a

development to watch and it will be interesting

to see if any other operators take the same

course of action, although as always, the

execution is all.




Welcoming ideas from across the

organization is an intelligent approach

Role models

It is important to provide good models for

new ways of thinking and working so that

others “get to feel and behave like them” and

understand that they too can make a difference

if they go about it the ‘right’ way.

Welcoming ideas from across the entire

organization is an intelligent approach on the

grounds that“it is arrogant of any function to

assume it has all the answers.” But as one

delegate observed, “A good idea can come

from anywhere, but you need to productize and

monetize it – that’s where innovation comes in.”

Social networking

One way to go about collecting ideas is by

using a social networking type-tool right across

the workforce to discover what needs to be

done, as one T8 attendee explained – from

changes in technology and pricing to interface

updates. Apparently this attracts “thousands of

ideas annually... maybe we end up following up

15 of them, some long term and some short.”

The social networking approach works

in improving day-to-day operations too,

to the tune of millions of dollars, as Lee

Scargall, Group Director of Enterprise Risk

Management, explains in the TM Forum Case

Study Handbook (page 10), published in spring

2011, which is free to members to download

from our website.

Scargall says, “We’ve implemented a wiki

where staff can exchange information andideas. In addition, we have also enabled tweet

alerts, and online chat capability so we can

share information across the group in real

time. This is particularly important when we

are dealing with fraud, so having the ability to

share vital information quickly can be critical in

preventing leakage.”

He continues, “The more you know about

fraudsters’ activities across different territories,

the stronger the position you are in to counter

them. Developing a group mentality is very

important, people need to feel they are part of

one team all moving in the same direction, and

we want to embed this in our culture.”

Clearly it works. Scargall is leading a three-

year program based on TM Forum’s Revenue

Assurance Maturity Model* to add $105 million

annually to the bottom line by 2012. The group

exceeded its targets in terms of revenue

recovery within the first year, with over

$50 million added to the bottom line.

For more information about how your

organization can benefit, contact Toni Graham,

Head of the Business Benchmarking Program,

via: [email protected]

Small ideas can have big consequences

The scale and scope of innovation caused

dissent in the T8 debate. Some insisted that

innovation doesn’t have to be about drastic

shifts that seek to overturn or radically change

the culture. One delegate suggested that

operator should try, for instance, cutting

roaming costs by a factor of 10, in a relatively

small market without legacy systems that

would make the provisioning too difficult, to

see if increased usage would drive more than

10 times the previous roaming revenue.

Although the fight for capital is often won by

those who can bring incremental improvements

and savings that will have an impact in the near

future, others thought this was wrong-headed.

One argued, “New ways of making money are

not just about fiddling with existing tariffs, butoriginal thinking. As of 15 months ago, M-PESA

in Kenya makes more money for Vodacom than

it makes from SMSs.”

Yet in a way, this is the same argument

put slightly differently: what look like small,

incremental changes to an industry that

operates on such a huge scale can make even

a brilliant new idea (like M-PESA was back in

March 2007 at its launch) look insignificant.

It is worth noting that despite the staggering

success of M-PESA, payments is an area that

*http://www.tmforum.org/

RevenueAssuranceBusiness/

2140/home.html and http://www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/

RevenueAssuranceMaturity/

11150/Home.html





operators have, in general, seemingly beenreluctant to get involved with and progress

has been slow. This is despite the fact, for

instance, that in the European Union, big

changes to banking regulation in 2009 mean

operators don’t need to partner with banks to

provide payment services in Europe, but can do

it on their own behalf.

While the communications industry has

been hesitating, Google has announced it

will provide point of sale (POS) terminals

free for a contactless mobile payments trial.

Merchants’ reluctance to pay for POS terminals

has been a sticking point in rolling out near

field communication or NFC-enabled handsets

despite many pilots, initiatives and trials around

the world.

Apple has long been expected to join the

NFC fray too and their entry into the market

(backed by mountains of cash in the bank

operators can only dream of) could mean

service providers have missed the boat, and

that payments will become just another OTT

service they carry without gaining a share of

the revenue.

Spotting the opportunities

One attendee commented, “It still isn’t clear

to me that we as an industry have the DNA to

be repetitively innovative – SMS was a bit of an

engineering accident, prepay an accountancy

accident.” Be that as it may, through a

combination of massively enthusiastic user

feedback of the most powerful sort there

is – using the services concerned – operators

were quick to see they had potential andsupport them.

It has been suggested that there is a great

danger that telcos will also give away their

location-based advantages because they failed

to capitalize on them while they had little

competition.

A participant from one of the world’s largest

telecoms groups said that service providers

are much too focused on today’s fat margins

to be sufficiently concerned with future issues

and uncomfortable changes. It’s sobering to

look back 15 years and remember how smallthe mobile industry was then, while Apple was

struggling desperately to reinvent itself and

Google didn’t exist.

In another 15 years, things that are small

and emerging sectors now – such as cloud,

e-health and machine-to-machine (M2M)

communications – are likely to be on a scale

we can’t imagine now and one that dwarfs

what has gone before.

Catalysts for innovation

One means of trying things out quickly and

with little risk is through initiating a TM Forum

Catalyst project. The projects provide a rapid

prototyping environment where suppliers and

systems integrators work together for between

three and six months to create innovative

solutions for operational and systems

challenges defined by end users. They could be

network operators, cable companies, defense

agencies, enterprise IT departments or other

types of service provider.

These projects accelerate development and

show just how the use of the Forum’s best

practices and standards enable parties to work

together, get projects off the ground fast and

prove operational and business benefits.

They enable service providers to speed

up trials that can lead to the successful

deployment of solutions and help the

Forum add to and update its standards

and best practices to accommodate its

members’ needs.

The solutions created by the Catalyst

project teams are demonstrated live atTM Forum Management World events. For

more information, see http://www.tmforum.

org/CatalystProgram/786/home.html and

contact Nora Doherty, Catalyst Program

Manager if you would like to participate:

[email protected]


http://www.tmforum.org/CatalystProgram/786/home.html







Ideas can come from anywhere

and small ideas can have very big results

There is an old joke that goes, “How many

psychologists does it take to change a light

bulb?” The answer is, “None, it has to want to

change itself.” The communications industry too

must accept the need to change and embrace

innovation to move ahead. We need to*:

Give people the power to make their own

decisions, rather than escalating everything

upward. This is too slow and too limiting.

Accept that creativity arises out of constraint

– tough times do not automatically mean

fewer options. It has long been recognized that

necessity is the mother of invention.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly

what you’re looking for, so long as you have the

wits to spot a potentially good idea when you

see it and have the courage to do something

about it.

Foster an environment that encourages and

enables innovation, even if it means setting

up an incubator or subsidiary away from the

potentially stifling influence of the parent

organization.

Ideas can come from anywhere, be receptive

to all sources.

Small ideas can have very big, unforeseen

results.

Don’t spend millions of dollars and months

planning huge, elaborate marketing campaignsuntil you know you’re on a winner, by trying

it out, internally where appropriate, and from

feedback from the outside world wherever

possible. It’s a great reality check, even if

the responses are not flattering or what you

expected.

Accept that failure is part of the learning

process, not a catastrophe, but fail quickly, learn

well and move on. Often you don’t need to kill

something, just tweak it based on feedback

from users.

General principles of innovation

Section 3

Listen to users, as often as you can and as

many as you can.

Industrial-strength engineering and five nines’

reliability is not always necessary in a world of

best effort and all-you-can-eat offers.

Really focus on what our customers want

– endless conversations about customer

experience often involve thinking in well-worn

channels (which created the problems in the

first place) rather than innovating.

Reliance on partnerships is inevitable, the

industry needs to see the over-the-top players

as partners rather than deadly enemies – after

all, they offer our customers services they

clearly want and are completely dependent

on our networks to do that. They too need to

evolve and offer a new generation of services,

and create more traffic to fill those networks.

Why are we apparently so reluctant to

assume the role of enabler?

To act on these recommendations (the list is

not nor intended to be exhaustive), standards

and best practices are key because without

them an organization spends too much time

reinventing what exists already and duplicating

effort, which is expensive and time-consuming.

Case studies show that standards are key

A critical element of innovation has to bestandards to provide operational flexibility

and speed, along with a platform from which

innovative services can be launched (and torn

down) quickly and easily. Business agility is

simply not possible if a service provider is

handicapped by proprietary systems and unique,

instead of repeatable and recyclable, processes.

The TM Forum Case Study Handbook (http://

www.tmforum.org/CaseStudies/2212/home.

html) shows how a standards-based approach

pays huge dividends.

*Many of these recommendations

owe much to Marissa Mayer’s Nine

Principles of Innovation. She is theVice President of Location and Local

Services at Google – see http://ecorner

stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer


http://www.tmforum.org/CaseStudies/2212/home.html










By using TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of

standards, as well as our Revenue Assurance

Maturity Model and other activities, operators

big and small, in developed and emerging

markets, are reaping huge benefits – from

faster deployment to big contributions to the

bottom line.

The case studies show how China Unicom

(with around half a billion subscribers) is

generating an additional billion dollars annually

in new revenues and cost savings, through

deploying Frameworx. At the other end of the

scale, we profile how Mobitel, Slovenia’s largest

operator (the country’s population is just over 2

million) was able to spend:

40 percent less on professional services;

80 percent less through the reuse of artifacts;

and

40 percent less on total cost of ownership.

At the same time, it cut its delivery cycle by

45 percent for ongoing maintenance and new

releases of processes.

A new innovation initiative for members

TM Forum has established a Think Tank to

provide greater leadership on cutting-edge

issues to its members and the industry at large.

The Think Tank leverages the ideas of TM

Forum’s senior staff, members and respectedexperts.

“By using TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards,

as well as our Revenue Assurance Maturity Model and

other activities, operators are reaping huge benefits.”


It will produce strategic assessments and

position papers, guidance for TM Forum

programs and knowledge assets for CxO level

executives.

The Think Tank is designed to provide

guidance as rapidly as possible. It will examine

an issue, assess its industry relevance, explore

what opportunities (if any) exist for TM Forum

and develop a clear position and strategy in

roughly a four-week cycle.

Additional activities, such as white papers and

executive education briefs, will then follow, as

appropriate.

For more information about the Forum’s Think

Tank please contact Jim Warner on

[email protected].

14 www.tmforum.orgQUICK INSIGHTS




ENABLING INNOVATION

The game is changing for communications service

providers. Cutting costs is merely a ticket to play,

not to grow. The key to growth lies with innovation –

underpinned by business agility, smart partnerships

and inspired creativity.

As the global industry association focused on

simplifying the complexity of running a service

provider’s business, TM Forum brings together a

community of more than 50,000 professionals on

the cutting edge of innovation. As a unifying force for

the industry, it’s time for you to join more than 750

companies across 195 countries collaborating to

simplify service innovation.

Visit www.tmforum.org to learn more about

TM Forum membership and how we help you

enable innovation.




www.tmforum.org


http://www.tmforum.org/

http://www.tmforum.org/

TMFC15493 - Innovation - The trillion dollar question.pdf

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