Keep in mind that despite having worked with operators all over the globe, I have been one of their fiercest critics when it comes to innovation and understanding the developer mindset, not that I deem to represent that mindset. Actually, it's more like mindsets. To O2's credit, they hired me as a consultant with a two-word job description: "Be disruptive."
That's where the O2 incubation scheme comes in and how it should be understood. This is not really about O2 following a chapter from the corporate manual. This is not a standard corporate play for them at all. It is not part of a grander plan, nor is it, as one developer suspected, just a cheap way to get some funky web stuff done. It's mostly an experiment, but one that O2 is seriously prepared to back.
The essence of the story is that O2, with its significant marketing expertise and customer base, has some insights into user behaviours and needs. Here, we're talking about SME customers. When I sat down with Simon Devonshire, who heads up SME marketing (and inventor of 'One Water'), he told me that he had been trying to get an idea off the ground that would enable SMEs to network with each other and their customers using the web.
My response was simple - O2 can't do this. It's too "webby" and needs a crew who understand how to innovate on the web. Sure, there are some potentially great cross-over points with telco and more traditional services, but it's essentially a web play. So I tossed in the idea of incubating a start-up, leaving them to innovate using the language of web innovation that a telco can't speak. And so the incubation scheme was born.
Those (few) developers who have ever worked with an operator will know what a flip this is on the more usual and restrictive supplier arrangement. This really is O2 stepping back to let the innovation happen at the speed of "internet thought" and only lending a hand where it makes sense. The incubation process is deliberately vague because it hasn't been finalised - that will happen in open discussion with the finalists and over the next month. The principles of offering money, support and a potential big pay-off are all there, but the emphasis at the moment is on finding serious talent who can make things happen in code, unhindered by a big corporate breathing down their necks with requirements and project charts. It is truly intended to be a win-win situation for the winning start-up and O2.
The opening launch is seeking entrepreneurial coders who can innovate around this theme of networking for small businesses - a kind of social marketing tool designed for small businesses. However, there are other themes being considered, some in them in really exciting consumer spaces.
O2 has taken a step towards trying a new way of innovating. Elsewhere, I am leading another project to use completely Internet-like paradigms and architectures to build a new service (by re-inventing an old telco one). I got together a group of internal and external talent, including some seriously cool UK web talent (from the Ruby gang) and some Hadoop experts, and I told them that we're going to run this like a start-up. In other words, if there's a "start-up way" versus a traditional "telco way," we're gonna pick the former. This is serious out-of-comfort-zone for some people, but that's how change happens.
I hope to put this project together with the start-up program, which will hopefully grow, and mix it up with some of the other cool stuff that we're plotting behind the scenes of O2 Litmus - watch out for some fantastic developer events that are totally beyond the conventional telco boundaries.
Seriously cool stuff is going to happen in 2010 (my zeitgest commentary coming later - thanks for the reminder from Martin Smith - @mjs1.)
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