Innovation Crush | Lessons Learned from AT&T Consumer Innovations
“Innovation to me is a paradigm shift for providing people technology to help them live, work and play“ – Urvi Bhandari
When most of us think of AT&T (or most telecommunications companies), we immediately go into tirades about things like how our phone calls always drop at that one spot on the freeway, or how our cable went out a few times last month, or how much we’ll be rebelling against the price of roaming charges for using our tablet in another country. Unfortunately most of us don’t realize, or perhaps appreciate, what it takes to keep millions upon millions of people – literally all over the planet – connected to the people, places and things we love… 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. (Click here for Louis CK’s take on this)
If someone had told us as kids that we would interact with one another in the world the way we do now, that person probably would’ve been burned at the stake. But thanks to a few giant leaps of innovation and technology over the past few decades, the impossible is becoming ever more possible, and “impossible” itself is a word that has an increasingly limited shelf life. Every day 100’s of new companies (along with some old) and thousands of brilliant minds behind them emerge with exciting new ways for us to do something. And guess what? 9 times out of 10, they use an AT&T product to do so.
When it comes to innovation at AT&T, few organizations capture the idea of “rethinking possible” the way the 140-year-old organization does. After all, the very idea is literally the words the company lives by. At the head of its innovation practice, we find Urvi Bhandari. As director of innovation, she is charged with ensuring that AT&T and its clients are paving a way for capturing and advancing, as she puts it, “how we live work and play.“ On Innovation Crush, Urvi explains how drastically the world around us is changing, and gives great insight as to the types of personality traits and organizational infrastructures necessary to build longstanding innovations in a world constantly in flux.
