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).

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.

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)