Ignite conference, TM Forum today launched its pilot Innovation Hub program. Designed to address the telecom industry’s most critical challenges, the Innovation Hubs aim to bring together the very best talent from across the global technology sector. These dedicated, collaborative teams will work quickly on priority projects, providing breakthrough, entrepreneurial thinking to deliver business impact and help reignite growth in the telecoms industry. The first, pilot Innovation Hub, is located at the Reliance Jio Corporate Park Campus in Navi Mumbai, India. It will host – both physically and virtually - teams comprised of talent from the initiative’s founding members: Accenture, Deutsche Telekom, Google Cloud, Orange, Reliance Jio, Telenor and Vodafone.
The Innovation Hub initiative builds on the Forum’s successful Catalyst program that has delivered hundreds of innovative, practical solutions to telco challenges over the past decade. Hubs are a new, unique way for the global telecoms industry to collaborate at speed, providing longer-term, dedicated resources to industrialise concepts explored by the Catalysts. The emphasis is on delivering ‘real world’ solutions with immediate business impact: working code and concepts proven in operational or shadow-operational environments.
Participating companies, including the founding members, contribute a range of expertise and resources to the hub, including seconded experts, physical space, technology capabilities and professional services. Reliance Jio is generously providing the private space and facilities for the first Innovation Hub.
The first projects to be undertaken in the Mumbai Innovation Hub will be:
- Generative AI and Large Language Models – exploring the potential of Gen AI and LLMs for telcos, creating architectural blueprints for the adoption of GenAI together with supporting demonstrations.
- Adopting Open Digital Architecture (ODA) – technology debt and legacy retirement - establishing a set of migration patterns and a library of adapters, APIs and other assets to simplify and de-risk migrations and enable the implementation of a composable architecture.
- ODA Accelerator – showcase ODA Components being deployed and running on multiple hyperscaler instances of the ODA Canvas demonstrating a plug-n-play environment that leverages public cloud capabilities giving operators the choice of which hyperscaler to partner with which also leads to the standardization and transformation of the operational management of Telcos’ IT.
The Innovation Hub and Hub projects will be managed by the TM Forum’s CTO office, with a new, dedicated team based in Mumbai. Founder members have committed to providing seconded resources for the first pilot projects, establishing the most effective ways of working, spanning the project lifecycle from concept to widespread market impact.
Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum
The number one challenge facing our industry today is urgently reigniting growth. As a result, industry-wide demand for collaboration and breakthrough thinking is greater than ever before. Following our pilot in Mumbai, we’ll refine and hone the model to create a global network of Innovation Hubs. Our goal is to pool world-class, dedicated resources that are beyond the reach of most individual telecoms companies and free from the normal constraints of large corporate environments. The Hubs will enable teams to work on agreed, collective, mission-critical problems that hinder our industry’s growth. They will overcome the existing limitations of member collaboration in ‘volunteer’ resources or short-life innovation projects, enabling us to drive outputs faster.
