Amdocs launches Nest to foster innovation among employees worldwide

Amdocs, the leading provider of customer experience solutions,on Wednesday announced Nest, which is specifically designed methodology to foster and encourage innovation across its worldwide employees.

The Nest program will provide Amdocs employees industry-wide best practice methodologies in innovation, along with supporting innovation mentorship, that help employees to define, refine, validate, evolve and transform creative ideas into tangible business opportunities.

During the week Amdocs will also launch its redesigned Innovation Center, include feature appearances by Pepper, the world's first humanized robot, and conduct a global hackathon.

In association with partners Microsoft, Chirp, Beyond Verbal and Wakingapp, the hackathon will leverage disruptive technologies in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, virtual chat bots, and artificial intelligence.

Held on an annual basis, the theme for this year's Innovation Week is 'Do you have the innovation factor?' and the event will be looking at different factors that characterise an innovative entrepreneur - daring, creativity, curiosity and passion.

For each of these factors Amdocs is creating specific activities that encourage these characteristics within a company - awareness, providing business value, recognition, new methodologies and creativity.

The global, 24-hour hackathon with 1,200 employees across 24 company sites taking part simultaneously.

A creativity workshop, led by artist Hanoch Piven will see employees creating self-portraits using everyday household objects. Sessions in India and Israel will build a collage of the thousands of Amdocs faces.

The launch of an Amdocs app that encourages employees to dare to be different by asking the question, 'When did you do something for the first time?'

Innovation Week will end with a festive award ceremony where Eli Gelman, Amdocs CEO, will give prizes to Amdocs Innovators and Patent Application of the Yearwinners.

"Telecommunications is in a state of transformation, driven by disruptive digital services and technologies," said, General manager, marketing at Amdocs, Gary Miles.

"Both service providers and vendors need to be able to quickly adapt and change. Amdocs sees innovation as a primary strategy in such a disruptive environment and heavily and systematically invests in innovation at all levels, from lean start up methodology like the Nest toworking with new start-up companies, growing our ecosystem of technology partners and academia ties and partnering with customers to drive innovation together. Our innovation programs play a catalyst role to all this, building an organizational culture that supports and promotes innovation all around," he added.

Amdocs is the market leader in customer experience software solutions and services for the world's largest communications, entertainment and media service providers.