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Nortel Chief Technology Officer John Roese recently talked to Gord Pitts of the Globe & Mail about his role as CTO and the transformation of Nortel’s R&D. You can see part of that interview in the below video.
The interview was also turned into a written Q&A, which you can see here. There is very little overlap between the video and the article, so both are worth your time.
Recently here at Nortel’s Richardson campus we had a “technology day” that allows the entire employee base to get an inside view on the various labs and customer showrooms that we have on campus. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures and a little video of the event.
Various R&D and tech leaders set up peds in the Nortel cafeteria to talk about the areas they focused on. You can see a quick video of that part of the event here:
In addition, employees were able to sign up for tours of the various local Nortel labs and customer showcase areas. Below are some …
When Nortel CTO John Roese speaks, people listen. Not only is he a brilliant guy, but he also holds the reigns to Nortel’s approximately $1.7 billion in annual R&D spend.
This Spring, Roese has already been busy talking up the accomplishments Nortel’s R&D organization has made, and where we are going.
Yesterday on his blog, Roese provided some additional color and detail on his R&D focus going forward. The post is centered on a recent Nortel Technical Conference — an internal Nortel R&D event last month in Orlando that brought together 300 of Nortel’s brightest R&D minds. But since the purpose of the conference is to focus Nortel’s R&D experts on what Nortel can deliver for our …
Mike Z opened up the day’s agenda with some of this thoughts on Nortel’s direction. I’m multitasking a bit with all the other news that has come out this morning, but there were a few items that I thought were really interesting from Mike’s presentation:
Mike mentioned today’s 4G news, specifically the new relationship with Alvarion. He said that the work with Alvarion will “allow us to leverage our R&D investments better.” This has been a topic in the past around Nortel’s investments in both WiMAX and LTE. Today’s news really seems to focus Nortel’s main investments on LTE for faster delivery in an accelerating market, while at the same time partnering Nortel with a company …
Last week I traveled up to Nortel’s Ottawa campus to host a tour of Nortel’s latest R&D innovations with a few “bloggers.” I describe them as bloggers, but blogging is just one of the many hats these guys wear.
Rich Tehrani is the founder of TMCnet, John Arnold heads up an analyst firm that bears his name and formerly was an analyst at Frost & Sullivan. David Greenfield has his own consulting biz and formerly editor for Network Computing. Vito Pilieci is also the tech guru for the Ottawa Citizen and has articles across many pubs. All-in-all we had some smart guys in the room — guys that have likely heard just about every angle to every …
This week on Buzzboard you’ll see a lot of coverage and analysis on where communications is going in the next few years. On Tuesday, Nortel CTO John Roese and IDC Canada’s Senior VP of Worldwide Consulting and Managing Director, Vito Mabrucco, will be hosting a press conference in Toronto detailing the results of a global study on Hyperconnectivity. The study covers a wide range of topics, from which countries have the most hyperconnected users to how many people admit to reading email in church.
And later this week, I’ll be traveling to Ottawa where we will be hosting several industry bloggers as part of our Nortel Futures 2008 event. We’ll be showing them the latest and greatest that …
We finish off our week of focusing on Nortel R&D here on Buzzboard by taking a look at some of the people that make it happen. Nortel has ~12,000 R&D professionals around he world. These are the people behind scenes that drive the innovation engine for Nortel, and help account for Nortel’s more than 3,750 issued U.S. patents and 1,750 in other countries worldwide.
As Tony Pirih mentioned our recent conversation about Nortel’s R&D transformation, “you can’t execute without great people.” To better recognize these people, John Roese and the R&D team recently created the Technical Fellowship of Nortel Program to recognize and highlight the company’s top innovators. The designation of Nortel Technical Fellow is a prestigious and lifetime honor that will be given to up to five individuals annually.
The 2007 Nortel Fellows, (L-R) Kim Roberts, Alan Graves, Simon Brueckheimer, Al Javed, Peter Ashwood-Smith and Wen Tong
Last summer, Nortel named its 2007 winners, the first group of Fellows who have passionately championed a number of revolutionary technologies and become part of the company’s network of valued experts.
Nortel’s 2007 Nortel Fellows are Peter Ashwood-Smith, Simon Brueckheimer, Alan Graves, Kim Roberts, and Wen Tong. Combined, these five individuals hold more than 200 patents, with more than 300 pending, many of which are already generating substantial revenue for Nortel through cross-licensing agreements. Nortel also honored Al Javed - a long-time pioneer of wireless technologies and retired Nortel veteran - with the designation of 2007 Fellow Emeritus.
Keep reading below for biographies and details on how each of these Nortel innovators have contributed to the company’s technology efforts. Full disclosure that I have plagiarized some of this content from this Nortel article that my teammate Wendy Herman recently wrote.
On Thursday I talked to David Hudson. A twenty-year veteran of Nortel, David is the leader of portfolio management in the CTO organization, reporting directly into John Roese. We focused on Nortel’s Incubation Program as well as the Open Innovation Lab, both of which he leads. Both are programs designed to drive the rapid development of innovative new products and solutions.
David Hudson, VP of Portfolio Management in Nortel’s Chief Technology Office
Last month when my teammates and I visited Nortel’s Ottawa campus, we saw the early fruits of these programs in person. While we also saw demos on 40G/100G, unified communications, and telepresence that came from Nortel’s traditional R&D side, the demos that caught my attention the most were from these innovation programs. Most were software and web 2.0 based, and built on the principles of SOA and the mash-ups of our technologies with other applications. And most interesting of all, when we asked at each demo how long the team had been working on each project, the answer was always in months and weeks instead of years.
In my conversation with David, I asked him about how the incubation program works, what makes for a good incubation program versus using a normal R&D path, and the culture changes that these programs are creating within R&D. Below is our conversation.
What is Nortel’s incubation program? We carved off a portion of the total R&D and said that it is strictly for investment in new products in new spaces that fit outside the scope of our current business. It is structured pretty much the way a VC would operate. Our exit criteria and options are a little different than what a VC would use of course, but from a decision-making standpoint we are looking at investments based on their business appeal. There are no blank checks. There are no huge lump sums. There is an early seed funding to get to an idea to a prototype, a second phase of funding to get a prototype to your first customer, then a third phase of funding that would help you go big and then transition into the business.
The other thing that we are doing is building a social networking type of capability internally to let people across the company bring forward ideas and also tap into the innovation pipeline of others within the company to contribute to further shaping the idea and possibly getting involved in implementing the idea.
What’s the difference between a technology/solution that’s developed as part of Nortel’s incubation program and one that goes through traditional R&D funding? It’s always difficult to create hard and fast rules, but generally we are looking for things that would address new market spaces. The basic criteria is “will this idea expand Nortel’s total addressable market?” If the idea simply allows us to do a better job in a space we already occupy, our bias is that the existing business units take it in. Because eventually if the idea is good, when it scales it’s going to have to fold into their plan of record and their go-to-market plan, and we don’t want to create internal competition for the same market.
Also, the time scale is a little bit different. With incubation we are looking from two to five years out, whereas that horizon for investment in the business units needs to be closer in.
As part of our focus on Nortel’s R&D transformation this week on Buzzboard, yesterday I talked with Tony Pirih about Nortel’s recent R&D efforts. Tony joined Nortel in March 2007, supporting R&D operations in the carrier organization under Richard Lowe. In November he moved into the CTO group - reporting directly to John Roese - to take over R&D operations across the company.
Tony Pirih, leader of R&D operations at NortelI asked Tony about a wide variety of topics, including his role (which is new to the company) and the challenges he faces, the future of Nortel’s Ottawa labs, Nortel’s China Labs, our ability to innovate, and the effects that these R&D transformation initiatives are having on the company.
Below is our conversation.
What is your role in the CTO organization? My role title is R&D operations leader, and I report to John. Fundamentally my job is to put an operational structure around all of the R&D being done across the company. To help facilitate that, all of the key R&D leaders from across the company report dotted line into me. John has responsibility for a lot of areas, and he realized he needed somebody who could really focus on the operational side of things. It turns out that a lot of the things that I did for Richard Lowe when I joined the company in Carrier R&D are what I’m now doing across the company. In a nutshell, my job really is to ensure that the whole of R&D is greater than the sum of all the parts.
How was R&D organized before your R&D Operations role was created?
One of the things this new role is intended to do - and where John has spent a lot of his efforts over the last year - is to bring back a sense of community to the R&D population. While I haven’t been at Nortel a long time, a lot of people have shared with me how things used to be. At one time, we had a very centralized R&D model and there were a lot of basic best practices here. Then Nortel went to a distributed structure, where R&D was fractured or broken up. Basically, each of the businesses had its own R&D organization and managed it independently. Although there were benefits in moving to a distributed R&D model - in many ways it got the R&D teams closer to the customers - there were also disadvantages in terms of duplication and inefficiencies. Also there was really no place where all of R&D rolled up to. So the goal of my role is to bring the R&D community back together again from an operational perspective, in order to improve overall R&D efficiency and effectiveness by better sharing across Nortel’s businesses.
What has been your primary focus to this point? Since November, my primary focus has been to drive five key initiatives that are targeted at fundamentally creating a more effective and efficient R&D function. Although work in some of these areas had been going on for some time, we officially launched the initiatives to the entire R&D community last December when we brought together all of the senior R&D leaders for a two-day working and planning session. A couple of significant things came out of that session. One was a detailed 100-day action plan for each of the initiatives. The other was the realization that an aggressive and targeted internal communications plan would be really critical to ensure understanding and acceptance across the company. It’s only April and we’re making great progress on all fronts.
Can you talk about the five initiatives that you mentioned that are your key focus to this point? It starts with people. One of the five initiatives is focused on talent management. You can’t execute without great people, so the talent management initiative is absolutely paramount and clearly one of the most important ones of the bunch. This initiative involves things like ensuring that you have a very comprehensive career development and mobility program in place, and training initiatives that will enable people to fulfill their careers in Nortel.
This week on Buzzboard we are focusing on Nortel’s ongoing R&D efforts. For a technology company like Nortel, R&D is the lifeblood of Nortel’s success. Since John Roese was appointed CTO in mid-2006, one of his main focuses has been on driving more efficiency and agility in Nortel’s R&D engine.
Last week, John and Nortel talked in depth about the results to date of those efforts, and about what is still left to do:
Improvements to Nortel’s R&D spending model: One of the most visible changes in Nortel’s R&D efforts has been the right-sizing of R&D spending on two levels. First, overall R&D spending as a percent of revenue has been decreased since 2006 so …
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