Deutsche Telekom Laboratories as a Testbed for Modern Technology and Innovation Management

Deutsche Telekom Laboratories has been set up with the ambition to be one of the leading places for corporate research and innovation in the industry. Consequently, not only the topics that are being worked on must be leading edge but also the way in which work is done. Scientific research in innovation research and management science as well as operational specifics and practical experience are the foundation of applied technology and innovation management at Telekom Laboratories. Telekom Laboratories has completed its first five years of operation – sufficient time to validate which approaches proved successful and which not. In this sense, the implementation and innovation management oriented “Innovation Development” unit of Telekom Laboratories1 has proved a very successful and extraordinary testbed for advanced methods in the management of technology and innovation coming from science (Yin 2008) and, as such, has already frequently been the subject of innovation researchers’ investigations. The methods and tools in this book are all described by the Telekom Laboratories experts themselves, who took findings from science, made them practically applicable as tools, methods, and instruments, and validated their applicability through years of use. In this sense, this work is the result of a participatory test of hypotheses on how modern technology and innovation management should work.