Illustrator Dennis Balogh

Ben Verwaayen

What is your current approach to innovation?

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE Euronext: ALU) has set what CEO Ben Verwaayen admits is a mind-blowing goal: to improve the energy efficiency of communications networks — including the Internet — by a factor of 1,000 from current levels. And he expects his company, along with a consortium of industrial research organizations, academics and network service providers, to demonstrate the key components and deliver the architecture, specifications and road maps required to accomplish this feat within five years.

The goal began when management at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, the company’s research arm, asked researchers to come up with the minimum energy consumption necessary to power communications networks. “To get the most from your talent, you want to give people a spot on the horizon and say, ‘This is where we’re going. We’ll figure out how to get there together,’” says Verwaayen, 58. He adds that it is easy to organize a collaborative, open exchange of ideas with the help of Web 2.0 tools: “You can simultaneously get 9,000 people in a session to talk about strategy or new products or new applications.”

Bell Labs’ researchers concluded that the communications networks could potentially be powered with just a 10,000th of today’s energy drain. Of course, that assumes a total redesign of communications. “Everybody from the chip guys and material makers to operators and governments will have to cooperate,” Verwaayen says. So in January, Bell Labs organized the GreenTouch^TM consortium with 16 other founders, including AT&T Inc. (T), China Mobile Ltd. (CHL), Telefónica SA (TEF), MIT, the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society, and IMEC, a nanoelectronics R&D center partially funded by the governments of Flanders and the Netherlands. “Some issues are so big, we need to solve them together.” — Sharon Kahn