Company: AT&T Inc., Dallas, TX
Company Description: AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet, voice and cloud-based services. A leader in mobile Internet with the nation’s most reliable 4G LTE network, AT&T also offers the best wireless coverage worldwide of any U.S. carrier. The company’s suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company of the Year - 2,500 or More Employees

Nomination Title: AT&T

Tell the story about what this nominated organization has achieved since January 1, 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Fast, secure and mobile connectivity to everything on the Internet – everywhere, at every moment and on every device – is driving AT&T innovation. It is why we build wireless and wired networks engineered to handle massive volumes. The more capacity and speed we build into our networks, the more intensively and creatively our customers use them. To keep pace and innovate around our network, AT&T jumpstarted our innovation program in 2011. Through our innovation focus areas – The Foundry, The Innovation Pipeline (TIP), AT&T Labs Advanced Technologies and our Developer program, the we’re helping our customers improve their lives with technology and giving them the ability to do what they want, when they want it.

At our AT&T Foundry centers, we’re working with developers, startups and other companies to move ideas to the marketplace up to three times faster. The goal of the Foundry is to get all parts of the business to maximize innovation throughout the company by removing barriers and embracing risk and uncertainty. To accomplish this, we have five Foundry innovation centers – in Palo Alto, Israel, Plano and Atlanta – all which serve as a space where collaboration with developers, startups, and other companies takes place to quickly take ideas to reality. Through innovation centers, we are coming up with new ideas, solving complex issues, speeding up the development process, putting innovative products and services into the market, and improving the network and customer experience of the future.

We’ve created the ultimate company “suggestion box” called TIP (The Innovation Pipeline). It’s quite possibly the largest corporate crowd-sourcing program in the world with more than 130,000 members. Through TIP, employees can share their experiences and come up with new ways to help our customers and more efficiently run the business. We also gain insights about our technology from the employees who use it every day. With more than 28,000 ideas generated and 75 projects landed for development, TIP is one of several ways AT&T is increasing the velocity of innovation and bringing new apps, products and services to customers faster than ever before.

AT&T Labs Advanced Technologies goes beyond today's current solutions to invent disruptive technologies that will drive future innovations. Our research programs are at the tip of the spear in creating advanced technologies in Big Data, Cloud Services, Intelligent Services and Networking and Service Quality Management. And, our researchers at the labs are the key driver of AT&T’s average of two patents per day. Their expertise continues to fuel the company’s heightened focus on innovation that benefits the AT&T customer.

We have a “fast pitch” outreach program that keeps us close to the latest in technology development in the world via relationships with the venture capital community. We’re opening up our network to external development and working with others to build and advance the network of tomorrow. We’re encouraging innovation by providing access to network functionality and intelligence. Through APIs and services, we’re giving others tools to build network functionality into their new apps and solutions quicker than ever before.

Rapid innovation across software services, cloud computing, mobile apps and connected devices are changing how people live, how businesses run and how economies grow. Additionally, they are changing AT&T into a vastly different company with unique capabilities serving new markets that will further differentiate us from our competitors. Over the past several years, we have taken several steps to position AT&T for the future through innovative efforts.

Less visible to customers today, but fundamental to how we’ll serve them and stay ahead of the escalating capacity demands created by video, is the work we’re doing to virtualize more and more of our core network functions – moving to a Software Defined Network. The advantages of this shift to software are game changing – dramatically lowering our costs, accelerating the rollout of new services and giving greater control to our customers.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of this organization since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

1. AT&T Foundry and our outreach efforts: we’ve met with more than 1,500 organizations through fast pitches and venture capital firms
2. Since its launch, the AT&T Foundry has started more than 200 projects and deployed dozens of new products and services.
3. More than 28,000 ideas have come from our employees via the TIP program in the five years since it started.
4. AT&T Labs Advances Technologies has the heritage of 8 Nobel Prizes; More than 10k AT&T-issued patents worldwide
5. The AT&T Developer Program has hosted more than 60 mobile app hackathons, engaging nearly 7,000 third-party developers, and producing more than 1,000 prototypes of apps.
6. In 2015, AT&T announced M2X Data Service, a platform that makes it easier for companies to create and manage new IoT solutions.
7. In 2014, AT&T provided wireless service to 3 million connected cars

Of the following types of innovation, which ONE do you want the judges to most appreciate about your organization's story of achievement since the beginning of 2014?

Overall Innovation