Re-Think of an Organizational Change

I joined Huawei, a leading global telecommunications provider six years ago and worked as standard engineer in Department of Wireless Standard and Patent. This department was set up in 2003 after Huawei received several patent infringement lawsuits from the key players in Telecom Industry including Ericsson, Nokia, Nortel and Alcatel. The mission of the department is to “build Huawei’s competitiveness by IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) cross licensing”.

In the first two and half years, I worked as a 3GPP (www.3gpp.org) standard delegate on behalf of Huawei. Standards play a key role in the telecom industry not only by steering future trends, but also by generating companies own essential patents (the patents in the industry standard specifications) for cross licensing with other companies. However, my work as a 3GPP standards delegate made me increasingly aware that Huawei’s standards activities often focused solely on patent generation and rarely conformed to the requirements from the telecom operators. For example, our standards team pushed our “multi-cast” solution in the universal mobile telecommunications system, but our product management team did not implement it in our own products due to low interest from carriers, neither did other competitors. As a result, although we could declare to own many IPRs on this “multi-cast” feature, we were unable to cross license these IPRs with other companies since no one needs it. Furthermore, such kind of standard activities would also damage our image in the operators’ eyes since they may consider that Huawei did not understand their problems and needs. However, even if the research teams were aware of such situations, they sometimes overlooked the problem. There was an obvious advantage to push such solution into standard since no other companies would block it due to lack of interests. I discussed these findings with the director of my department and proposed incorporating marketing and product strategy into our standard activities. The director of standard shared the same feeling with me, and he agreed to let me have a trial in the department to define standards strategies to guide the activities in the global standard organizations.

The main idea of my proposal was to define the position of each research topic according to the customers’ needs and our marketing strategy. With the director’s consent, I quickly found another two colleagues and built up a small team called “wireless standard strategy team” to carry on this proposal. We first went through the research areas of the ongoing projects to identify the topics that did not align with our customers’ requirement or our marketing strategies. Meanwhile, we also tried to set up some criteria to access the topics. Then, we started to talk with the project managers and persuaded them to abandon those misaligned topics. Although the managers showed their willing to change, they actually did nothing to