One year of joint innovation with Huawei
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Upon partnering with Huawei for LTE rollout in Norway, Telenor signed on for Huawei's Joint Innovation Centre (JIC) program. One year and several projects later, the JIC is in full swing developing services to help Telenor differentiate.
When Telenor partnered with Huawei for LTE rollout in Norway and Sweden, the two companies also opted to launch a Joint Innovation Centre (JIC) together. Huawei has historically established JICs with their telecom partners, and Telenor embraced this opportunity to stimulate innovation and differentiation during the LTE project and beyond.
“Our collaboration with Telenor truly embraces the spirit of open innovation. After just six months of operation, Huawei recognized our partnership with an internal award, ranking Telenor’s JIC fourth among Huawei’s 30 global centres,” said Anja Warich, Director Joint Innovation Centre, Huawei. “From the start, Telenor has shown its clear willingness to cooperate as a partner. Through careful planning, a professional governance system, well-anchored projects and a good buy-in from Telenor’s business units, we are confident in our ambitions to run eight more projects in 2011.”
JIC completes Quality of Service project in its first year
After just one year in existence, the JIC project list is only growing. The team recently wrapped up one of their first projects, a Quality of Service (QoS) initiative in which they looked at service differentiation and opportunities for offering premium services to users. This means that a Telenor business unit that offers LTE to its subscribers could additionally offer classes of services to users, such as a gold, silver or bronze subscription. The subscription level would translate to the speed that the user experiences, for example when viewing HD video or downloading a file.
“One of the JIC’s goals was to find ways to help our Business Units differentiate in the markets we operate. With the QoS project we are creating an opportunity for just that – the chance to offer services on top of the ordinary LTE subscription. Through our collaboration with Huawei, we have been able to develop this concept and actually see it work in practice,” said Ruza Sabanovic, Head of Network, Telenor Group.
From the drawing board and into the network even faster
The JIC set out to shorten the time to market when it comes to adding features into the network. By developing projects in conjunction with Huawei, Telenor is able to quickly turn an idea into reality, as they have done with the QoS project.
“By working this way with Huawei, we are getting confirmation that QoS, for example, works before it is deployed out in the market. Once developed and proven, there are very few steps remaining when it comes to moving from the lab to the network; it’s simply a feature upgrade,” explained Anders Morthen, Program Director for the JIC, Telenor Group.
Telenor’s business units that are undergoing an LTE upgrade now have the option to take advantage of the JIC’s successes, and they can possibly gain a competitive edge by introducing a unique market offer on top of LTE. Not only is the QoS offer unique, but it also is tried and tested, so business units can be confident that their customers will be getting a high quality offering.
Realizing new business possibilities
“We have several projects in the pipeline that will keep us challenged over the next year or so, and we are currently planning to expand our reach outside of Scandinavia as well,” said Anders. “Through the JIC, we have really been able to realize new business possibilities that will help our mobile operations worldwide get new and relevant services out to their customers quickly. Our main criterion for a JIC project is that it is innovative, and as we wrap up our first project and delve into many others, I believe that we’re off to a good start.”