NTT i3 is driven by a belief that innovation is not only a necessity in today’s ever-changing business world, but that innovation should truly be the soul of a company. As a result of that philosophy, teams at NTT i3 focus on developing technology that solves both significant global business challenges and real human needs. NTT Innovation Institute, Inc. (NTT i3) is the Silicon Valley-based global innovation center for NTT Group, one of the world’s largest ICT companies. They work with both established enterprise companies and early stage digitally-native businesses to identify ambitious ideas with game-changing potential and develop them into new technology platforms that readdress significant business and consumer problems in the marketplace.
Transforming Ideas From The Lab into Marketplace Realities
NTT i3’s full lifecycle approach to innovation focuses on taking ideas from the lab into the marketplace. Value is placed both on the open innovation process of exploring and prototyping ideas, as well as commercializing them with real customers in the marketplace. Unlike startups, the company has access to a well-funded global team of operating companies and customers with whom they can partner on commercialization efforts.
In addition to the vast assets of NTT Global, NTT i3 relies on its diverse innovation teams, a culture that supports risk-taking, and programs that help bring engineers’ passions to life.
In order to address issues of global significance, the company cultivates diverse talent working on collaborative teams. This includes having the right mix of technical and business skills – and also enabling people to follow their personal passions. A team might include business architects, machine learning experts, security experts, UX and UI designers, and project managers. For NTT i3, it’s all those people working together and bringing different perspectives, that make their approach to innovation work.
NTT i3 believes that it is important for enterprise companies to change the way they think about risk and failure if they are to truly develop and embrace innovative practices. So while diversity of talent is critical, NTT i3 also builds the right culture to support the works if its people. At NTT i3, employees, industry experts, and outside entrepreneurs work together in an environment that supports the inherent risk of innovation and welcomes open exchange and debate.
The company is also focused on supporting the sparks of creative ideas emerged from an engineer’s passion. NTT i3 provides the financial and talent resources of a global enterprise company to the people, while moving at the speed of a startup to tackle early stage investigations.
Working with Global Innovators and IT Leaders to Create a Better World
NTT i3 is always investigating ways that IT managers can more effectively respond to the networking and full technology stack issues that result from today’s fast-changing business conditions, while also pragmatically managing their existing infrastructure investments.
Current areas of applied R&D focus and innovation investigations include:
Healthcare: NTT i3 is investigating ways to use data to personalize medicine. By accessing and integrating data sets from public sources, private companies, and connected hardware devices, healthcare can become personalized with vastly improved outcome around issues of drug interaction prediction and remote treatment compliance.
Wearables: NTT i3 is monitoring human biology to change athletic performance. By using wearable technology to collect real-time data from athletes, analysis can be performed suggesting ways to improve performance not only for an individual, but also for larger defined populations.
IoT Security: NTT i3 is defining new ways to protect billions of connected hardware devices from hackers. In industries that are rapidly automating such as manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare – developing technologies and practices that enable the attacks to be predicted in advance and also provide more rapid and effective responds to those incursions has become a life critical’ requirement.
There are several platforms which NTT i3 has commercialized and are in the market place with the partner operating companies.
GTIP: Delivers a next-generation enterprise cybercrime toolkit of software and managed services to proactively identify and defend against threats by the intelligent consolidation and analysis of threat data from multiple sources.
ESI: Enables enterprises with multiple sites or locations to quickly setup and flexibly manage network operations with carrier-grade functionality and broadband-based flexibility.
NTT Cloud Plan: Informs cloud transformation by collecting relevant company-specific information using customized surveys, so clients can understand the plan to migration in just days instead of weeks.
NTT Cloud Migrate: Maps application requirements to appropriate primitives such as compute, storage, and network for self-service ease and control of cloud migration and management.
Leading Business Development Innovation at NTT i3
Ravi Srivatsav, Chief Business Development Officer at NTT i3 is responsible for all aspects of product marketing, sales and business development – in areas including software-defined networks, edge computing, and machine learning technologies at NTT i3.
Ravi began his career in the technology sector as a product developer and product manager in enterprise software working with Rational Software, IBM and Microsoft. Additionally, he was the head of platforms and games at My Space (Fox Interactive Media) and Social Gaming Network (SGN).
Prior to NTT i3, Ravi was the founder and CEO of ElasticBox, an enterprise startup designed to manage application workloads in a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Reflecting on how NTT i3 is different Ravi says, “Creating an environment that supports change has been really hard in large corporations, largely due to the pervasive fear of the unknown. At NTT i3, we are dedicated to changing that by creating an environment that supports people for embracing risk, trying something new as a team, and learning from the process.”
In talking about the commitment to supporting engineers’ passions “We want to provide the engineers with the time and financial resources to act like a scrappy startup team, quickly prototype and iterate on ideas, and see if it has the legs to develop into something that can solve a significant human and business challenge.” asserts Ravi.
