John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

Location: Boston

We just completed our first annual Nortel Technical Conference, held last week in Boston from June 4-7. This conference is one of several initiatives we’ve undertaken within the technology community over the last year to reassert our technology leadership and commitment to transforming the industry.

CEO Mike Zafirovski with conference participants

For 112 years, this company has been involved in the creation and delivery of the most advanced telecommunications technology in the world – and has fundamentally helped shape the industry as we know it today. But, for the past five or so years, the company has been somewhat distracted from that effort as the result of a host of issues brought on by both the technology downturn and internal challenges. Under the leadership of Mike Z, however, the management team has spent the last 18 months systematically addressing those issues and now that many of them are resolved we are at the point where we can once again start to focus on being a “normal” company. As a normal technology company, a focus on innovation is key and this conference was, in my mind, an indicator that we are establishing an operating rhythm that is focused on the future and that leverages our 12,000 R&D professionals to create that future and to capitalize on the mega-trends I’ve discussed in prior posts. I wanted to share with you some highlights from the conference in this blog entry.

Demographics: This conference brought together 300 of some of our top R&D professionals in Nortel. They represented every business unit and product line in the company, came from 16 different countries, spoke many languages, and had a tenure ranging from 1 to 33 years of service with the company. This group alone has generated more than 2500 invention disclosures (more than 1900 of which have been filed as patent applications, resulting in over 1100 issued patents worldwide to date) and has been responsible for tens of billions of dollars in product revenue. In addition to the core R&D participants, we also invited key leaders from our systems engineering teams (the technical leaders embedded in the sales and field organizations) and some key sales, marketing and service personnel.

One of the poster board sessions

Speakers: The goal of the conference was to facilitate networking, to stimulate innovation and collaboration, and to create the next ideas that could propel a product and solution set forward. As part of this, we brought in a mix of internal expertise and external perspectives. One of our external speakers was David Clark from MIT, one of the early pioneers of the Internet and of late a leader in challenging the model by advocating a re-thinking of many of the status quo communications models. Also joining us was Steven Shepard who challenged this technical group to understand that their customer and customer’s customer are changing as Gen-Xers are replaced by the “Millennial” generation. This talk was particularly interesting to many in the group because, although we all must understand our customer and their behaviors in order to develop the best solutions for the market, many in the audience gained new understanding into the “unexplained’ behavior of the Millennials living in their own homes (their children). Additionally, we had Johna Till Johnson give an analyst’s perspective on the challenges and myths of the market and the industry. These three keynotes took the group from deep technical dialog to human behavior to industry behavior and were universally effective in engaging the group to think not just about the “how” but also the “why”.

Official welcome at MIT

The conference also consisted of panels, brainstorming, workshops and collaboration activities. One of the highlights was when we took the entire group over to the MIT Media Lab for an evening of exploration and networking, which was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. For more than 30 years Nortel has collaborated with MIT in exploring the next questions. From this collaboration, technologies such as Wireless Mesh and the One Laptop Per Child initiative (where I now hold a seat on the Board of Directors) were spawned. This deep research collaboration with this premier institution has been an invaluable asset to seeing the future early enough to shape it with product and technology.

Results: The ultimate objective of this conference was to spawn innovation and collaboration and, in that regard, the event was certainly successful. Hundreds of new ideas were captured and thousands of hours of direct interactive collaboration were facilitated. As we consider the problems of the future, it is clear that they will be cross domain and multi-dimensional and, as such, having an opportunity to link voice experts with wireless inventors, and switching engineers with developers of real-time communications in virtual worlds, has the effect of clearly showing how much each domain is impacted by the others. We have a symbol in Nortel called the “Atom Chart” that visually captures our belief that the domains of wireless and wireline, infrastructure and applications, and carrier and enterprise are converging and interacting in ways that the industry has never before seen. This conference brought the atom chart convergence to reality because experts from all of those domains were present and collaborating. From that collaboration is the future of not just Nortel but of the industry.

As we return to being a “normal” company, one that is 100% focused on our customers, technology, the industry and competition, our R&D community will be – as it has been in the past – our strategic advantage. We have one of the largest and most talented R&D teams in the world with the requisite expertise in all of the converging domains. This event in Boston is just one example of an increased velocity in our R&D efforts and our focus on innovation. Others include the launch of a new Nortel Fellows program, expanded new graduate hiring, new technical recognition programs, and an evolution of our R&D investment model (where we are rebalancing our 2006 spend of 10-35-55 for emerging-current-legacy products/technology to 20-60-20, and where we’re making good progress).

When I joined Nortel just about a year ago, my goal was simple: to ensure that Nortel is the most innovative and effective technology company in our industry. So far, good progress and more to come.