EuroBusiness Media (EBM): Orange, France’s number one telecoms operator and the leader in Europe, is hosting today its second annual Hello Show 2013, which is its annual event to showcase innovation. Stéphane Richard welcome. You are the CEO of Orange. Do you really think that telecoms operators, such as yourself, can still compete with the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks and Apples of this world in terms of innovation and make it a differentiating factor for yourself in the marketplace?
Stéphane Richard: Definitely, I think so. We have the skills, we grant a lot of resources in fact to innovation. I think we have a lot of assets to bring to the customer and to innovation, and you know, even though probably telcos have a little bit missed the first years of the Internet revolution, I think that we have seen plenty of opportunities ahead of us. And I like what Geff Bezos - one of the big guys of the Internet - says about internet when he says that we are on day 1 of the trip, of the journey. I think he’s right. It means that in the future we will have lots and lots of new things, new products, new services, a lot of innovation. It will come of course from internet guys but also from the telcos, and in fact I’m definitely convinced that in the future - when it comes to mobile banking, when it comes to the Internet of things, big data, cloud computing -, we will see that the telcos have clearly a very important role to play in the future. As far as we are concerned at Orange we want clearly to make innovation a core priority of the company. We put a lot of resources into innovation and it’s true that we are in a market where everyone is talking about price war, every day. But what we want to do is to provide new, useful, competitive services for our customers. And we want to make innovation a way to differentiate ourselves fromthe competition, to be competitive on the price of course but at the same time keep ambition in terms of providing innovative services to our customers.
EBM: Some critics have called your R&D slow, top heavy, overstaffed, saying that it’s generally not adapted to the needs of customers today. What do you respond to that?
Stéphane Richard: I think it was quite true. We come from a history, it’s our legacy, with very strong skills, - because we have a lot of skills, a lot of people that are very dedicated to their business and very innovative -, but at the same time it’s true that we have a heavy structure, a heavy organisation. We definitely needed to make it more efficient, more able to produce concrete and real innovations to put in our customers’ hands, and that is the reason why I launched a big project within the company to make all this innovation chain much more customer driven, efficient and connected to the reality of our markets. So it is definitely one of my key priorities as the CEO of the Group to change deeply the way our innovation people are working together, and also with marketing and with all the people who are in front of the customers. I want this to be focused on customer experience, I want us to start from the customer experience in order to produce our innovations in a rapid way - the time-to-market aspect is absolutely crucial, critical -, and also of course, to identify the very few priorities where we have to really concentrate our needs.
EBM: Now, today, at the Hello Show! 2013, is the opportunity for you to showcase the big innovations for the next 10 months. Are there any in particular that you would like to highlight?
Stéphane Richard: There are plenty of them, of course, but I would like to highlight maybe first what is related to the network itself. Today you have plenty of networks, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi and in fact when you are mobile what you need is to get access to the best network available. So we have developed a small application, very simple to use, that will give you control on your network - our network which is your network - by switching automatically to the best network for you. This is one example. A second example I like is about a new device, of our own design, that I will show today. It’s called le Bloc in French; it’s a pico projector, a connected object of course, that will make it possible to project on a wall all your contents from your smartphone, from your tablet, so that you can share them with everyone around you. Once again easy to use, and I do think that it will fulfil a need when one wants to share some entertainment, fun, content with friends and family without being on a TV set or very small screen. I would maybe mention also what we are doing in a new domain for us - I think it’s a very promising domain-, which is mobile banking. Maybe you know that we are a big actor in the telecom market in Africa where we launched a few years ago a mobile banking service called Orange Money, which is a very popular and successful service. We have more than 8 million active users of this service and I do think that mobile banking is a major opportunity for us. I’m convinced that in the very near future lots of people will use their mobile phone to pay in a shop, on the internet, in a very secure way. And in fact as we have access through the smartphone and the SIM card the way to secure all the transactions, I think that as a telco we have a lot to bring to mobile payment, mobile banking. I will launch, in a few months’ time, a new service called Orange Cash in France, in our home country, which I think will be quite a revolutionary step in the way mobile banking is going to be: a daily, very useful and very practical, convenient service.
EBM: You’ve mentioned some innovations that come from within your own company. But today innovation is everywhere, including outside of the company. So let me ask you this; what is your strategy for open innovation?
Stéphane Richard: It’s a major change once again. In the past, we had a lot of engineers and very talented people in our labs. And our labs were to some extent closed. I think that today we have to open: open windows, open walls and we have to just take into account the fact that the digital world of tomorrow will need the contribution of everyone. You have millions of developers in the world and you know, what has made people like Google with Android or Apple with IOS so successful, is their capacity to federate those millions of people that can bring their own creativity and talent to innovation. I am definitely involved, committed to bring open innovation to the core of Orange. It’s a cultural move but we have to accomplish it; it’s definitely our wish so we will do it in a lot of different ways. We are going to launch specific programs like Orange Fab which is an accelerator that we have tested in the US, in the Silicon Valley, and that I’m going to launch here France now and in other European countries. We are going to also dedicate specific space in our labs to students, engineers, start-up guys to really try to welcome the most people that can bring to the world, to us, to our customers, their innovations.
EBM: Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange, thank you very much.
Stéphane Richard: Thank you.
