At Deutsche Telekom’s Innovation Day, the company presented initial successes of close cooperation with start-up companies in Israel – from idea to mature product in one year.
Today, at Innovation Day in Berlin, Israeli start-ups and Deutsche Telekom presented the first results of their successful collaboration. International guests from the worlds of politics, business and research gained insight into innovative solutions that Deutsche Telekom developed within just a year, from concept to mature products and services, together with Israeli start-up companies such as Decell Technologies, Triplay and Zlango.
At the event held at the company's offices in the German capital, Deutsche Telekom board member Hamid Akhavan emphasized the significant role that active, multi-faceted innovation management plays in enabling the company to provide Telekom customers with new solutions as quickly as possible. He added that this was why the group worked globally with small, creative start-up companies in important development centers for information and telecommunications technology. Mr. Akhavan referred to the close collaboration with numerous large and small Israeli companies. He added that, after the U.S., Germany was Israel's most important trade partner. "Israel has earned its reputation as ‘Silicon Wadi’ due to is strong high-tech industry and its tremendous innovative power," Akhavan stressed. He continued to say that Deutsche Telekom was therefore closely observing the country's ICT industry. At the event, Mr. Akhavan also thanked the representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, MoITaL, for their excellent cooperation. Next on the agenda, MoITaL representative Rachel Roei talked about the innovative high-tech culture in Israel and its significance for her country.
Christopher Schläffer, who is responsible for the group's product innovation and development, provided insight into the process, organization and goals of innovation management. "Maintaining the balance between technological feasibility and the actual customer needs is the essential aspect of managing innovation." He used Israel as an example to explain how the innovations presented had been initiated, developed and realized. He went on to say that out of over 200 innovative high-tech and start-up companies, an extensive selection process was used to single out and link those companies that it considered the most interesting for the company and its strategic business fields.
One of these projects was initiated in cooperation with T-Systems and Decell Technologies. With this innovation, traffic jams can be identified by evaluating information about the movement of cell phones within one cell, and the owners of the cell phones can then be notified. A WLAN-based development by the company AeroScout enables users to locate items that have been equipped with RFID tags. This technology provides hospitals with more efficient logistics when it comes to managing hospital beds, for example. Zlango, an SMS icon language by the company of the same name, is available for everyone to test on T-Online's beta portal (www.beta.t-online.de). On the beta portal, the first innovative Web 2.0 solutions are already available to users and being tested in real life.
With its focus on Israel, Deutsche Telekom’s Innovation Day showed that the strong application-oriented approach of Isreali ICT companies can help Deutsche Telekom translate pioneering solutions for innovative, new services into products that can be used commercially. The initial results of the collaboration were so promising for Deutsche Telekom that the company even wants to intensify its cooperation with high-tech and start-up companies from Israel in the area of information and communications technology (ICT). An agreement that was signed by representatives of the Isreali government and Deutsche Telekom in the presence of CEO René Obermann in Jerusalem at the beginning of October will contribute to an even better point of departure.
Since 2006, the Bonn-based group has been represented in Israel at the Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Beersheba by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin. BGU is considered to be a global leader in the areas of information and telecommunications technology, especially, when it comes to IT security. BGU is located in the Negev desert and supports Telekom Laboratories, an institute of TU Berlin, in their research and development work with innovative software for security solutions.