Amdocs has launched a disruptive leadership programme and a new innovation home for employee idea generation.
Amdocs, a customer experience solutions provider, in conjunction with its Innovation Week recently introduced Nest, a specifically designed methodology to foster and encourage innovation amongst its employees worldwide.
Nest will provide Amdocs employees industry-wide best practice methodologies in innovation. It will support innovation mentorship, and also help employees define, refine, validate, evolve and transform creative ideas into tangible business opportunities.
During the Innovation Week, Amdocs will also launch its redesigned Innovation Centre, including a featured appearance by Pepper – the world’s first humanised robot— and will also conduct a global hackathon. In association with partners, such as Microsoft, Chirp, Beyond Verbal and Wakingapp, the hackathon will leverage disruptive technologies in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, virtual chat bots, and artificial intelligence.
Held annually, ‘Do you have the innovation factor?’ is the theme for this year’s Innovation Week. The event will be looking at the different characteristics associated with an innovative entrepreneur – daring, creative, curious and passionate. For each of these characteristics, the company is creating a corresponding activity to encourage awareness and provide business value, and recognise talent, new methodologies and creativity.
“Telecommunications is in a state of transformation, driven by disruptive digital services and technologies,” said Gary Miles, general manager- marketing, at Amdocs. “Both service providers and vendors need to be able to quickly adapt and change. Amdocs sees innovation as a primary strategy in such a disruptive environment. Therefore, it heavily and systematically invests in innovation at all levels, from a lean start-up methodology such as Nest to working with new start-up companies, growing our ecosystem of technology partners and academia ties and partnering with customers to drive innovation together. Our innovation programmes plays a catalyst in all this, building an organisational culture that supports and promotes innovation all around.”
The global, 24-hour hackathon will bring together 1,200 employees across 24 company sites taking part simultaneously. In addition, a creativity workshop, led by artist Hanoch Piven will see employees creating self-portraits using everyday household objects, as sessions in India and Israel will build a collage of the thousands of Amdocs faces. The company is also launching an app that encourages employees to dare to be different by asking the question, ‘When did you do something for the first time?’
The Innovation Week will end with a festive award ceremony, where Eli Gelman, CEO, Amdocs, will give prizes to the winners of the Amdocs Innovators and Patent Application of the Year awards.