Telecoms in Greece

After a 5 year price war, telecoms are bleeding...

The telecom industry in Greece has hit a dead end. After years of losing money, the crisis has hit Greece and things are even worse than before. Telecoms are trying to produce business oriented services since the residential market is dead, but even there they are facing huge problems. The majority of the businesses are doing poorly and the rest of them are simply too afraid to invest.

Still telecoms are trying to provide new services and new solutions to a market that is in a sand box.

In these difficult times people/businesses can really innovate, but they need a plan.

The approach should come from the bottom-up.

Since upper management has tried and failed, now is the time corporations should start tapping into their talent and listening to their employees or their customers for new ideas that could probably help the company overcome this crisis.

Companies nowadays are obliged to create an Open-Innovation environment – culture. They would be amazed at what (ideas) people can come up with.

Telecoms are continually trying to provide services to a market that has no growth instead they should aim to provide services globally. They can facilitate the software, the people & the termination services by providing online services not only for wholesale but also for the retail market. With this approach they can be competitive in new markets.

The bottom line is that businesses should create an Open-Innovation culture. Organizations should cooperate and start an internal growth that could give to the company a competitive advantage in the market. We cannot expect a small management group to innovate and lead successfully the whole time.

All employees should have the opportunity to contribute to a company’s growth afterall, “harnessing bright and passionate minds from every discipline and every walk of life can indeed change the world in the most profound ways” (Dwayne Spradlin CEO of InnoCentive).

Stefan Lindegaard’s "The Open Innovation Revolution" - Book Summary and Review

I have just finished reading the book "The Open Innovation Revolution: Essentials, Roadblocks and Leadership Skills" by Stefan Lindegaard.  Stefan is a very active member of the LinkedIn and Twitter innovation communities and his expertise is open innovation.  Stefan also comments on and addresses diverse aspects of open innovation through his blog 15inno.

I have been following Stefan’s 15inno closely for quite some time now, and I was actually eager to get my hands on his new book. After reading the book, I have to admit that I am impressed because Stefan, based on his innovation and intrapreneurship work experience, paints a very realistic (and sometimes harsh) roadmap of how open innovation is to be implemented successfully. His direct, personal writing style coupled with his numerous examples of open innovation initiatives (successful and not) and interviews with innovation leaders and intrapreneurs, bring out the characteristics that are essential in designing and implementing effective open innovation programs.  I also especially liked the list of key takeaways that comes in the form of a bullet-point summary at the end of each chapter.

Nokia goes Open Source

On February 23^rd of this year Nokia announced that Symbian had become Open Source. Google’s Open Source Android mobile phones and the smart phone by Apple (iPhone) have dominated the market with their innovation, beauty and excellence for the last 2 years.

What about Nokia?

Intellectual Property Resources for Innovators

Intellectual Property (IP) is an issue of utmost importance to inventors and innovators that is often overlooked.  In this post, we describe what IP is  and provide URLs with information about different IP topics of interest to people in the (open) innovation community.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, Intellectual Property can be divided into two categories: Industrial Property, and Copyrights (http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/index.html). WIPO defines industrial property to include "inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographical indications of source" and copyright to include "literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs."

Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation in Greece

On Friday, February 26, 2010, we had the chance to attend an interesting all-day workshop on "Intellectual Property Rights & Innovation" at Athens Information Technology (AIT) in Greece.  The workshop, successfuly organized by Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou and Professor Gregory Yovanof (both of AIT), sought «to explore the strategic role of intellectual property rights (IPR) in the course of  innovation in the global and highly competitive information society and highlight the importance of IPR  in promoting innovation and economic performance».  The main goal of the workshop was to merge distinct communities such as the legal,  business (Venture Capital) and the research and academic communities and to provide an opportunity for innovators and IPR experts to share their views and communicate their experience in the field. We plan to give an overview of the workshop now and will return to specific topics that are of interest to us in future posts.

InnoCentive: The eBay for Innovation

The company InnoCentive is a pioneer in the emerging field of Open Innovation (OI) and a company that is rightly considered OI’s poster child.  InnoCentive is as an electronic marketplace for ideas, an “ideagora” or an “eBay for innovation” as described by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in their best-seller book “Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything”.

InnoCentive was launched in 2001 as a spin-off from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company.  InnoCentive acts as an intermediary between organizations with difficult unsolved problems and people (including scientists, engineers, mathematicians and business people) or organizations that attempt to successfully solve the posed problems in order to qualify for a pre-specified financial reward, ranging from $5,000 to $1 million based on the complexity of the problem.  InnoCentive calls these problems “Challenges”, the organizations that post these problems “Seekers”, and the people and organizations that attempt to provide solutions “Solvers”. 

Digium.com EC analysis

A short history of Digium.com


Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer. Asterisk is released under a dual license model, using the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a free software license and a proprietary software license to permit licensees to distribute proprietary, unpublished system components. Source (wikipedia.org)
“Necessity (and in some cases simply being cheap) is truly the mother of invention. In 1999, having started Linux Support Services to offer free and commercial technical Support for Linux, I found myself in need (or at least in perceived need) of a phone system to assist me in providing 24-hour technical support. The idea was that people would be able to call in, enter their customer identity, and leave a message. The system would in turn page a technician to respond to the customer’s request in short
order. Since I had started the company with about $4000 of capital, I was in no position to be able to afford a phone system of the sort that I needed to implement this scenario. Having already been a Linux user since 1994, and having already gotten my feet wet in Open Source software development by starting l2tpd, gaim, and cheops, and in the complete absence of anyone having explained the complexity of such a task, I decided that I would simply make my own phone system using hardware borrowed from Adtran, where I had worked as a co-op student. Once I got a call into a PC, I fantasized; I could do anything with it. In fact, it is from this conjecture that the official Asterisk motto (which any sizable, effective project must have) is derived: “
It’s only software!
Source (Asterisk* The Future of Telephony) oreilly.com

Commercial VS Open Source

The almighty question:
Go Open Source or buy Commercial software?


Of course, the answer is much more complicated than that. We will attempt in this post to define some of the factors that are playing a crucial role to this decision. However, we will mention only a few; we expect to get the rest from you as food for thought!


There are a few dimensions to be defined concerning software:
1. Security
2. Coding quality (bugs)
3. New Features/Upgrade circle
4. Support
5. Administration


The main focus of this post will be the area of telephony soft switches / call centers. 

What is Innovation?

Innovation can be simply defined as "invention plus commercialization" (Christopher Freeman), or as "a new way of doing things that is commercialized" (Michael Porter).


The term "innovation" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "invention", although the concepts are readily distinguished. In business, according to Wikipedia, "innovation can be easily distinguished from invention. Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas. Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash."


Innovation begins with creativity, the generation of new and useful ideas. Well-known, practical creativity techniques include brainstorming, de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, and TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).


The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that there are essentially four types of innovation: product innovation; process innovation; marketing innovation and organisational innovation. Melissa Schilling, a prominent academic in Innovation Management, in her book Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, identifies four dimensions widely used to distinguish types of innovation: product versus process innovation, radical versus incremental innovation, competence-enhancing versus competence-destroying, and architectural versus component innovation.


We are Alex, Willings and Andreas, and currently study towards a Master of Science degree in the Management of Business, Innovation and Technology at Athens Information Technology. We have diverse experience in Research and Development, Telecom and Networking, Education, Business and Finance, Open-source development, and Patent Law. As part of a project for a very interesting course on E-business taught by Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou and Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou, we have decided to create this blog that will discuss in detail issues related to a relative new and hyped about innovation discipline, namely "Open Innovation" (OI). We plan to provide a general overview of OI, summarize leading-edge research on OI, define opportunities and challenges, and describe how OI is used in practice. We also plan to address two disciplines that are very much related to OI and are of interest to us: open source and intellectual proprietary rights.


We truly hope that you will enjoy our blog! Ideas and comments are always welcome.


The Open Innovation Team!
(You can also find us on Twitter)