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There are a lot of areas for Qualcomm to
grow in. First of all, there's just the natural evolution
of second-generation technologies to third- and fourth-generation technologies.
People are getting new phones, they're getting smartphones, a lot of that's
happening in emerging markets. So the growth there is
quite strong. Then we look at some areas
internal to the industry where there's demand for data that's
quite strong and the networks aren't able to keep up with it.
We've created technology and products to address that and
even give us a thousand times more capacity in the networks
at something like a thousand times less cost.
And so we've been focused on that as a
growth area as well. And then there's
the fact that computing is changing. We all now use our smartphones
to get our email to get on the internet,
but the bigger form factor is tablets. The things that we used to use a laptop or a
desktop computer, these are going to be increasingly mobile.
As we take the technologies that we perfected in the smartphone
and we use that always on connection -
instant on, always synchronized, very power efficient -
and we take that to the full computing space,
I think there's a very large growth opportunity for us there.
Then if we work out a little farther the whole notion of the
"Internet of everything" where all the things around us will be connected -
The phone will sit at the center of that. There will be sensors in the environment
around us, sensors on our bodies;
we'll have wearable devices, both for measuring us and for giving us
feedback. These will all interface into the phone and
the net effect will be this merging, blurring of cyberspace and real space.
That will happen
because the phone is there, giving you access, tell you what content services -
people the things that are around you that you can interact with.
There's a lot of opportunities for growth in that area.
We're looking at healthcare as a really interesting
possibility, as well as smart grid, automotive, consumer electronics. We're even talking to
white goods manufacturers about
connectivity being built into refrigerators and washing machines and
all the kinds of appliances that you have in your house.
There are lots of opportunities going forward. The opportunity there that
you can have advances in smart grid and health care and education and
just the ability to get connectivity everywhere in the world - not just in
developed countries but in
developing and emerging markets as well - so this
is a big idea. Another big growth area is
in the network. The networks are going to change. They're going to be deployed
much more like a Wi-Fi access point instead of the traditional
way a cellular network has been deployed in the past, which is
big towers that are beaming the signal into the building.
In the future, you're going to have small, very inexpensive devices that will be
inside your home,
providing a very high bandwidth in your home, and also providing coverage out
into the street for people
walking by as well. In that way we're going to increase the capacity of the
network dramatically.
You won't have to worry so much when you want to download that video, or when you
want to do
other things that take a lot of bandwidth, whether it's
augmenting the reality that you see around you,
transmitting back information about your health, and
sensor data of you or the environment around you,
getting information on when I walk into a retail
environment, they can give me offers and I can
either accept or reject those things. I can protect my my privacy or I can let
them know that,
"Yeah, it's Paul Jacobs who just walked in the store and I want to check in so I get my loyalty
points." There's a lot of really interesting implications
of having connectivity in the world around us with this 1000X idea that we have of
making the network dense and much higher capacity and lower cost, or this
idea of the Digital Sixth Sense, where we'll actually be blurring the
the lines between physical and cyberspace. I think those kinds of
ideas are big and they will be
trends for the next 10 years.
To really try and foster a sense of innovation
in the company, the first thing you have to focus on are the
people and their ideas, and to create a work environment where they have access
to each other, to a lot of diversity,
a lot of information and idea sharing, that they have access to the best
equipment, the best platforms, that they understand why they're doing it,
that we articulate a clear vision for the company and for the industry so
people can can innovate within that
vision. Right now we're working on a vision we call the Digital Sixth Sense
which is this idea that
the world around us will be connected and the phone and the devices that we
carry with us will allow us to essentially blurr
physical space and cyberspace. That creates the opportunity
for people to innovate in software, and services, and new radio technologies, and
new chip technologies, change the way that our phones actually work,
create new accessories and new products. There's a lot of opportunities
to to do that. But I think the key thing is that
we allow our people to
create new ideas and actually work on them and try and
turn them into something bigger. We have a very formal processes
for innovation in business units where it's more incremental, there's
very tight processes and then they go all the way out into
things where we have web sites where people can upload
ideas, and it goes through a whole peer review, and then there's a contest and in
the end people get to
create something and present it to the senior management of the company.
As senior managers, we spend the time and listen to the pitches from the various
teams and then
find places for those things
to be commercialized or whatever would happen with them.
So we have a wide range of processes and, fundamentally,
I think the thing that motivates people the most is that
they're part of a company that's in an industry which is probably the most profound
and most widespread technology platform that humans have created which is
the wireless industry. They know that if they have an idea
it can improve people's lives in a massive scale so there's a saying,
"Think globally and act locally." At Qualcomm the engineers
and, in fact, everyone at the company, knows that they can think globally and act
globally, because if you have an idea
in the span of three months with the scale
chips that we ship, you can get your idea into 170 million
plus people's hands in three months.
There's not a lot of places in the world where you can do that. So you know that you
literally can change the world for the better with your ideas.
That's probably the most motivational thing.
Qualcomm in five years will be pretty much the same company in the sense that
our core businesses will still be
our main core businesses, but we are
and we have been, partnering with companies in other industries.
I see over the next five years
there will be an increasing recognition that wireless is
an enabling technology for other industries. Health care is one that
we look at, but also automotive and
energy and education and a broad range
of areas. I think, over the next five years, Qualcomm will be seen as a partner
to an even broader range of companies
than we are right now. Right now we're known well in the telecom industry,
not so well outside. I think in five years we will be known
much more broadly. One of the ways that
we create partnerships in other industries, we really try and
get ahead of the curve to gather people who are
interested in the application of wireless to
whatever the other industry is, pull them together in
conferences, and think tanks, and these kinds of things. Then we go out
publicly and make speeches about that
and find the forum where we can
express the idea. One of the things that we do to try
to build partnerships is, try to bring people together and the reason is
because when you get convergence
of industries, which - of course convergence is a very overused word,
but people think that what that means is that everybody in both industries
participates and what really is the case it's the overlap.
You have to find the people who understand the issues of both
the wireless side and whatever that other industry that
we're working with is. In order to create those people, who don't
really exist at first, you have to bring people together. You bring people together
over a fairly -
it can take a few years to build up the expertise, and we are there now
in the healthcare space where we've created a whole
set of people who understand both wireless and
healthcare and now those are the people that are going to create the progress.
One of the areas that
we really try and engage with the communities that we work in is through a
project that we have called Wireless Reach,
where we go around the world and we find governments,
NGOs, local wireless operators,
local partners and we use the wireless technology
to create some social benefit whether it's
in health care, education, entrepreneurship, public safety,
e-governance. There's a lot of different programs that we
do around the world. What it does is it
has actually been proven in many cases to improve the lives of people.
We've done a project, for example, in India where
fishermen use their phone to get weather information, get information where the
fish are, get information
where there's market demand so that they don't all go sell
their fish in the same place. It's already been proven to improve
the economics of
those fishermen. We do projects around healthcare
where we have a tele-dermatology project in Egypt, where people use their
cell phone camera take picture of skin conditions,
they then send it back to a panel of
doctors who then can diagnose and tell a person,
"OK, here's what you now need to do with this."
We've done a number on education programs. We have one
in the United States where we gave smartphones to
kids in an algebra class. There was a control - the same teacher two classes,
one class had the smart phones, one didn't and the class with the smartphones
scored thirty percent higher on standardized tests than the one without.
Another area that we worry about in terms of stakeholders is obviously
environmental. We're very focused on
having our buildings be green. We're focused on recycling and sustainability.
As you get a broader range of
stakeholders that are interested in the company, whether they're directly
invested in it or they're
third parties that are monitoring, you have to be
transparent. We went through a process
earlier in the year where we were requested to make
more transparent our policies around
donations to political campaigns. That's a big issue in the United States
right now. We were able to resolve the
issue so well that we came in -
we were tied for first in terms of the most openness and
political transparency. Obviously there are some things relative to the business
that you have to keep as
secret, that you don't mess we want your competitor to know exactly how you
structured this contract or that. There is a delicate balance, but
in things like, things relative to the environment, things
relative to
you know your engagement in the political process. In those kinds of things
we try and be as open as we can. I think that helps are standing in
in the community.