The eGarage: AT&T Labs' Incubator

An Early Description:

The AT&T Labs e-Garage

 With the convergence around Internet Protocol technology of virtually all forms of telecommunications, as well as information and entertainment access, it has become imperative that we compete on shorter time scales than ever before in the history of AT&T. While we have more than our fair share of excellent service concepts and technology, we still need to decrease our concept-to-market interval. The AT&T Labs’ e-Garage  is being created to help the corporation level the playing field – enabling AT&T to produce competitive services on Internet time.

 The e-Garage is a dedicated set of personnel and physical facilities committed to extremely rapid conversion of ideas and raw technology into prototype services (at least at trial scale). It will be more intensely focused than our normal R&D activities, with small teams on Internet timelines, intent on creating viable prototypes in a small number of months. Its focus will be on IP and broadband services and its primary constituency will be AT&T business units and divisions. New ideas for the e-Garage may come from Research, from the BU's, and even from customers and business partners. The e-Garage will be governed by a board that includes key BU members, who, by being "angels" on projects as they move through the process, will help maximize the chances of a successful business connection at the end of the development period. 

 The key to a successful e-Garage project is to have (1) a person with an idea and the time to work on bringing that idea to reality and (2) an AT&T Business Unit that has ‘endorsed’ the idea and will take the prototype on to market trials and possible deployment. Once these criteria are met, idea teams are brought into the garage and supported with other tools and resources. A project manager helps define a schedule and major milestones, and the team meets regularly to track progress.

 The e-Garage will not only have technical resources for building prototypes, but will also include business-oriented resources that will help increase the level of sophistication of the products and especially of potential business models. We intend to use rapid user-centered interface design processes, also extremely early in the lifecycle. We will use our own expertise as well as possibly external partners to add attractiveness and excitement to our user interfaces.

 The e-Garage is being created as a partnership between the Labs’ technology transfer group and Ron Brachman's research organization. Ken Schmidt is supporting the e-garage team and welcomes any ideas that could become new projects.

For more information, see this presentation and this overview.

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