The communication world is changing at a rapid pace.
Disruptive technology like artificial intelligence, IoT, and collaboration tools are changing the way that we speak to both our co-workers and customers alike. Innovators like Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) are the companies leading the charge towards the communications space of tomorrow.
ALE comms division is devoted to creating and selling state-of-the-art solutions for communication and collaboration on-premises and in the cloud. This October, I was fortunate enough to attend the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Annual Open Day for myself and learn a little more about where the company is heading from Communications leader, Nicolas Brunel.
At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise headquarters in Paris, I sat down with Nicolas Brunel, the Executive Vice President of the Communications Business Division for ALE. He told me that when the Open Day first began, it was intended to promote and inspire R&D development for the company.
"Innovation is something that we've always promoted at ALE. We ask people to share their ideas as often as they can and motivate everyone to feel comfortable with thinking outside of the box. When the ALE open day was first perceived, it was a very intimate event, designed to give R&D experts a chance to share the ideas that they had been incubating with other members of the company. Beyond the benefits for the company, it is also about having our people proudly sharing their own projects. It is a privileged moment for team building”.
Nicolas told me that when ALE started to recognise the passion that the open day had ignited in their team, they decided to expand the event with the hope of gaining more useful feedback from a wider community.
The Link between Teamwork and Innovation
By bringing the ALE open day to the masses, the company felt that they could generate more useful information about their industry, and the things that their customers needed most. "We wanted everyone to have a chance to talk about what we were doing and give their opinions. This isn't a commercial event for us; it's not about making sales, it's about facilitating innovation and growth."
Nicolas told me that customer centricity has always been an essential value in the ALE manifesto. "We want to make sure that everything we produce has the right impact on our customers, and the best way to do that is to get our entire community involved."
Nicolas noted that innovation is changing - a lot like the trend of collaboration in the current business space. "Today, innovation can be anywhere, not just within the walls of your company. It's like collaboration, we started with internal groups and conversations, and now companies are looking for ways to collaborate with external forces too. The more you can connect with your ecosystem, the better your results will be."
What Kind of Things Can You See at the ALE Open Day?
As ALE's annual open day has evolved, allowing the company to connect with other designers and bring people together on the search for digital disruption, the event has become increasingly exciting. Nicolas told me about one of the demonstrations they had available at the conference this year, which came from a university in the south of France. The teachers in the university often needed to travel to different locations to deliver lectures. To reduce the cost of travelling, they began to invest in video conferencing; then they took that idea to the next level.
