Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series: Open Innovation

This week’s ‘Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series’ talk was given by UCL alumnus Jogesh Limbani, Head of Open Innovation at Orange Labs UK in Chiswick, West London. UCL students Mansour Abdulghaffar and Carolina Mostert summarise his lecture below.

Jogesh’s background
Limbani completed a BEng in Software Engineering at the University of Sheffield and an MSc in Telecommunications at UCL. He recently returned to UCL for an EngD in the field of communications.

After joining Orange in 2002, Limbani held seven positions within his first three years. Among those, he started off as software developer and then became project manager for a team of seventeen people. He then became the labs’ Head of Research and is now Head of Innovation, the first holder of this title within Orange.

Watch the full lecture below

Innovation structure
Jogesh began by asking UCL students which among France Telecom, Orange, EverythingEverywhere they thought he was employed by. Surprisingly, although he is Head of Open Innovation at Orange Labs, his employer is actually France Telecom, which bought Orange. Orange labs are established in strategic locations worldwide which allow them to tap into the local intelligence. Limbani mentioned a few of them: San Francisco (giving them access to start-ups and SMEs in Silicon Valley), Beijing (important for manufacturing), Tokyo (for artificial intelligence and robotics), Cairo and Oman (to strengthen their position in Africa and the Middle East).

As Head of Open Innovation in the Orange UK Labs, Limbani envisioned a project, later to be called “Orange Service Call + Reward” (OSCR). This brought external innovators and Orange (with financial and human resources) together to create innovations. Orange planned to finance and patent ideas which had the potential to be worth €20 million. Throughout OSCR, as the innovation is developed, the idea and patent are still owned by the inventor. Once the invention is realised, Orange makes an offer to purchase the patent, a high risk since it may be worth up to €20 million. OSCR is a shared reward project since it is a win-win situation for both parties: the innovator initially receives £100,000 for the idea and Orange can eventually use the idea.

Challenges
Limbani described the difficulty of creating OSCR. His UK-based managers found it hard to accept his idea, forcing him to fight his way to the top of France Telecom to convince the Chairman to accept it. Having launched the OSCR project, Orange Labs UK were faced with the problem of trust; innovators were reluctant to disclose their ideas to a large multinational firm with huge resources. Therefore, Orange Labs hired three intermediary companies (Nesta, Live|Work, and Wireless Innovation), instructing them to select relevant innovations in line with Orange’s criteria and standards. Throughout OSCR, Orange would be kept in the dark about the innovations and their innovators. Only when the winner was selected would the information be disclosed.

Last Second Tickets
The winner of OSCR was the idea “Last Second Tickets”, a service exclusive to Orange customers. There are over 44 million unsold tickets in the UK, worth over £770 million of untapped sales. “Last Second Tickets” aims to sell these tickets to Orange customers shortly before the event with a two-for-one offer to encourage sales. Orange customers can expect to see Last Second Tickets launch in the next few months and it is hoped it will be as successful as Orange Wednesdays, also created by Orange Labs UK.

Crowdsourcing volunteering
Lastly, Limbani concluded his talk by describing “Mobile Volunteering”, a concept from Open Innovation. He pointed out how on average adults in the UK spend over three hours watching TV every day. If Orange convinced them to spend five minutes once a year volunteering through their mobile phones, this would equal a decade of volunteering. Here, Orange uses the “crowdsourcing” model to promote mobile volunteering and to collect ideas for mobile applications from which society would benefit. Crowdsourcing is used to find ideas and to vote for the ones the users would like to see developed, leaving to Orange the task of developing them.

The UCL Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series is organised by UCL Advances.