As consultants in Silicon Valley we love to see ourselves as Prometheus bringing the fire of innovation to the ambitious enterprise. But pressure from shareholders, short term revenue goals, and maintenance of existing products is high. While everyone in an organization agrees that innovation is the motor of progress and growth, resistance to innovation can be found across all levels. As a result, we want to minimize our risks and call for “proven innovation.” An oxymoron? Not at all. One example of innovation we will discuss is Detecon’s Playout Intelligence Initiative, which targets the ecosystem of rich content playout – from UbiquitousTV to voice-enhanced location based services. The approach goes hand in hand with the Innovation Intelligence phase. One of the key success factors is the creation of tangible prototypes and proof-of-concepts within the live environments of our clients – innovation that works.

Playout Intelligence is a holistic and integrated approach to creating winning margins in rich content playout: Holistic, as it is a true end-to-end view beyond simple delivery and network connectivity; Integrated, as it addresses both fixed and mobile service offerings, billing and digital rights management (DRM), as well as combined business models and integration into next generation transport platforms; Rich content, with the vision of true "single play," a combined playout of voice, data, video, and business-to-business information. It is part of a lifecycle approach of developing/deploying/maintaining new services for our customers. This is a key aspect of product innovation that will allow our customers to differentiate themselves in the competitive telecommunications market.


An example of
how innovation happens


Jointly with a customer, a large Internet Service Provider, Detecon identified Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC) as a strategic focus field for future growth. The client was specifically concerned about the impact these technologies might have for retail and consumers, and how they might be able to leverage these emerging technologies to increase visibility and brand awareness to their customers.


We started by mapping out the client-specific ecosystem with regards to markets, technologies, and services. Within this ecosystem, we were then able to match different scenarios from near term implementations to strategic investments. We leveraged our excellent network in Silicon Valley with its fast paced innovation and product life cycles to create over 40 creative scenarios built on existing stealth mode companies, startups, and incumbents. Our direct access resulted in 20 new opportunities for additional revenue streams, and in over 80% of the scenarios we were able to identify potential partners, investment opportunities, existing pilots, or beta services, that our client was not previously aware of. The complementary Prototyping Funnel System provided the business sanity check (see Figure 1).
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