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Innovation is Alive and Well at Nortel
Location: Barcelona, Spain
It’s been a crazy few weeks for me but, finally, I have some time to catch up on a few blog items. Sitting here in Barcelona after flying over night from Ottawa via Heathrow, I was reflecting on the Nortel Patent Awards Gala we held in Ottawa Friday night. These awards recognized Nortel employees from Ottawa (our largest R&D center, with 5000 employees) and other nearby Nortel R&D sites (e.g., Boston, Belleville, and Montreal) for recently granted or filed patents. (We will be doing similar events in London and Dallas over the next month.)
Now, in general, this is a pretty internal event so dialog related to it on my external blog might not be of interest to everyone, but what struck me as Mike Z and I stood on stage for what seemed like hours recognizing our inventors was not only the sheer volume of innovations that this company continues to produce, but more importantly, the fact that the R&D community continues to seek out the “white spaces” and new areas that will ultimately be the future of telecom.
To reflect on the relevance of innovation to Nortel’s long-term strategy, let me recap a brief talk I did Friday night.
If we look at Nortel’s past, the biggest inflections the company is associated with were the shift from analog to digital telephony, the transition from copper to fiber, the acceleration of wireless networking, and the move to IP-based services. While we were not the only player in these industry transformations, it is reasonable to assert that we were either the significant or a key player in each.
The DMS family of switching systems (foundational to Digital World) was a radical departure from traditional telephony architecture and, while high risk for Nortel at the time, ultimately transformed the PSTN. Our FiberWorld initiative in the late 1980s was driven by our innovation in SONET technology, and with the increased capacity for core transport from that technology much of the modern Internet was accelerated. In cellular and wireless, Nortel was not initially a player but with our joint venture with Matra Cellular, we entered a market that today we have significant presence in (for example, about 25% of the worldwide CDMA market). And, finally, the shift to IP-based systems was not lost on Nortel. We were one of the first telephony companies to support IP as a core transport and, today, continue to be number one in terms of market share for carrier VoIP (at 15%) and number two for IP Business Telephony Lines (at 16%), according to Q2 07 reports from Dell'Oro.
Behind every one of these inflections were large IPR positions that enabled us to shape the market and defend our technology innovation.
If we look at the current strategy, we see a similar model. Today, we are focused on fourth-generation (4G) wireless systems, on next-generation wireline transport, and on Unified Communications technologies. If we look behind these spaces, we also see huge IPR positions and enormous innovation from the Nortel R&D community.
Many consider us a leader in MIMO technology and our breadth and depth of patents in this space (dating back to the late ‘90s), support that view. MIMO will be key for 4G, and that IPR and innovation, coupled with a wide range of other inventions, make us confident in our technology footing. In the Carrier Ethernet battle, our position that a simplified and de-layered packet-based transport centered on Ethernet is the way to the future is supported by 5+ years of inventions and patents in the space. Finally, in Unified Communications, the current model of embedded telecom functions and network services into the applications experience is something our inventors have been focused on for more than a decade. Last Friday we recognized many inventions in areas such as click-to-connect and presence and location services. This area is particularly exciting for me because a large part of my own patents and filings (back when I had more time to do that kind of work 
) were in this space.
I guess the point of this post is to make the statement that if you want to shape the telecom or IT world, you don’t do it on the spur of the moment. Instead, you do it by a consistent focus on continuous innovation and a strategy that takes that innovation into commercial practice. The above examples represent a 40+ year timeframe of this focus at Nortel and my view from Friday night’s event was that this culture of innovation is still very much alive and well at Nortel.
I have included a few pictures from the event that capture the scale of it. Considering this is just one of 3 events we will do to recognize the inventor population at Nortel, even this event by itself does not capture the breadth and depth of our innovation engine.
Hopefully you found this blog entry interesting even though it is not an industry or technology dialog. My next entry will be to catch up on the scale of regulatory activity in the industry and a position that we have more activity going on today in public networks than maybe we can absorb.
Photo credit: Mike Pinder Photography
Me and CEO Mike Zafirovski with Peiying Zhu (one of Nortel's most prolific inventors, who was recognized for 4 patents & 21 filings in 2006).
Photo credit: Mike Pinder Photography
Dinner in the ballroom.
Photo credit: Mike Pinder Photography
CEO Mike Zafirovski and Wen Tong (a Nortel Fellow who was recognized for 15 patents and 23 filings in 2006), enjoying the evening entertainment.
Photo credit: Mike Pinder Photography
Mike Z with Alan Graves, a Nortel Fellow recognized for 9 patents and 8 filings in 2006 (seen hauling away his awards in the purple box). Alan also holds many of the fundamental patents in SONET, the key technology that enabled the industry to transition from copper to fiber transport.
