NTT pulls its finger out of the patent dyke with Scale Academy

This is what Scale Academy is going to address. Under the leadership of Bennett Indart, SVP Product Incubation, NTT Research, it will begin to move many POCs to shippable products. This cannot come too soon.

Upgrade 2026 is a watershed moment

At Upgrade 2026 in San Jose this week, the company is showing off its latest research. One of the products on show is SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security solution built on NTT’s Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) research. Over the last few years, the company has shown multiple interesting POCs around ABE. None of these has been commercialised. Bennett is tasked with changing that.

In a press and analyst briefing, Bennett remarked, “My background is in NTT DATA for almost 20 years. I find myself finding roles that take things from zero to one, building a practice, launching a product.

“You probably saw some of the things that we did at IndyCar at NTT DATA several years ago. And continues on with analytics around that. That was my team that built that from scratch. It was an analytic platform taking data from the edge processing through the network and using AI to help come up with stories about race cars.”

The company will be hoping that Bennett can do the same for the mountain of patents that it has stockpiled. With over $3bn every year invested in R&D, NTT is long overdue a return on that investment from its research division.

How will this work?

That remains to be seen. Bennett says that he will be picking through the patents and research that are interesting. He wants to find projects that have commercial street credit and then get those to market. With such a huge backlog to choose from, Bennett plans to start small. The first project is SaltGrain, and it seems that it will be a pilot to test the process and approach.

Another challenge will be selecting the right projects. Bennett set out four initial targets for any project:

• Can we sell it?
• Can we take it to market?
• Will it benefit customers and society?
• Is it sustainable?

That last goal is core to NTT’s business approach over recent years. It has worked hard on sustainability, from materials to power requirements, and then recycling. With old tech products creating their own mountains of e-waste, NTT wants to be seen as doing something different. It is a topic that the Research Division has talked about over the last few years. Now it will be part of the core design and monetisation philosophy.

From flagship first product to innovation factory

What is not yet clear is how Bennett will ramp the Scale Academy to become an innovation factory. He talked about the advantage of having so many VCs on the company’s doorstep in San Jose. That means access to capital. But NTT also has deep pockets and remains highly profitable as an organisation. The question is, how much will it invest to bring products to market?

Money is not the only key factor here. The company continues to show off its research into optical and quantum computing. Yet the researchers are happy to talk in terms of four to five-year timescales to get to the next stage.

Bennett will need to change that approach from cool tech to deliverable tech. That will not be easy. It will be a huge culture shock for the business, but he does, at least, have the background to change things.

There is also the question of how to become a start-up business incubator. Will research teams be incentivised to deliver commercially? That again goes to culture.

Another question is will NTT create a place where creators can come in, find new ideas and exploit those patents? If so, this will need to follow the innovation garage approach that other tech companies have taken over the years. It might also be the fastest way to show some gains and accelerate culture change.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

NTT has woken up to the vast untapped potential in its patent portfolio. Woken up might seem harsh, but it applies here due to the slow pace of research to product.

There will be a lot of eyes on Bennett as he works with the SaltGrain team to bring that to market. Next week, Enterprise Times will publish a podcast with Bennett to look in more depth at his plans. It will also publish a separate podcast with the SaltGrain team. That will look at the technology and how it is moving from a history of cool POCs to a commercial product.

NTT lags behind some tech companies in exploiting its research. With Bennett in charge of the Scale Academy, will that change?

The post NTT pulls its finger out of the patent dyke with Scale Academy appeared first on Enterprise Times.