China Telecom taps IBM 'Innovation Factory'

IBM’s “Innovation Factory” -- a Web 2.0-style product to help service providers brainstorm Web. 2.0-style services -- has landed a strong endorsement from China Telecom.

The Shanghai Research Institute of China Telecom said it has chosen Innovation Factory to support collaborative service creation and speed the delivery of new services in China.

Innovation Factory is focused on the service design and creation process, providing tools like forums, wikis and social network functionality to enable cross-company teams from service providers, vendors, software developers and other partners to work together.

IBM’s vision is that, in order to deliver innovative services more quickly, carriers need to re-think and re-work how they conceive and design those services as well. China Telecom joins Sprint as an early Innovation Factory customer.

China Telecom worked with the IBM High-Performance On-Demand Solutions Labs and IBM China Research Lab to launch Innovation Factory as the platform for China Telecom "Innovation Works," a tool to facilitate enterprise innovation activities. The carrier will use the platform to host an innovation contest focused on encouraging employees to continuously contribute and share feedback on new service ideas.

“The idea here is to use things like social computing tools – wikis, blogs, polling, profiles – in a coordinated way and bring together the processes and people to brainstorm new service ideas,” said Tim Greisinger vice president of IBM Global Communications Sector business in IBM's Software Group. In addition to those collaboration tools, the platform includes “a toolkit, SDK and sandbox to help mash up new services,” Greisinger said.

IBM’s larger vision is that, once new services are conceived, rough ideas from the Innovation Factory are spun up into requirements documents that can feed developer tools – including its own IBM Rational tools, it hopes – to rapidly deliver new services. Those services can be tested within that same overall environment, with test feedback and results flowing back into the Innovation Factory collaborative environment, Greisinger said.