Telecom Companies are looking for Innovations

Everyone is talking about the growth of the Mobile telecom industry, half of today's population already use the services offered by this ever increasing industry. Future trends predict that it is only a matter of a decade and some years to capture the other half of the population. There is one industry that is suffering the most due the success of the Mobile telecom business, the traditional Fixed-Line Telecom industry.

In an interview with the New York Times, chief executive of the British Telecom, Ben Verwaayen, is betting that services like customized applications for corporate clients and advising companies on their networks can generate profit growth in an industry where they are loosing out to the subscription base of end users pretty fast. He stresses on how there is a need to move away from selling the telephone calls and sending faxes to more services which are backed up by social networking capabilities.

He points out that the way to innovate is not by investing in a large Research and Development team but to form small innovation teams across the layers of the industry which are closely in touch with the customers. He points out that British Telecom has a huge team of 26,000 people working for them in India, not because the labor is cheap but the fact that they see more entrepreneurial people in the Indian markets.

Read the interview here.