SigEx Foundry Leadership Training Process by Diana Zotescu

The SigEx Foundry Leadership Process

Goals

The telecommunications industry, after massively investing in more fiber optics and capacity, is realizing that the problem is not about the bandwidth, it’s about traffic. A new industry is emerging from these findings : Enhanced Communications.

The SigEx Foundry re-training and job creation program has been mandated by SigEx to develop custom Enhanced Communications training to deploy over a thousand engineers in the next three years. The new industry, Enhanced Communications, will require a minimum critical mass of newly trained engineers able to develop and install enhanced telecommunications products and services on a global basis.

The SigEx Foundry has just conducted a thorough European site selection for the ideal location with a sufficient supply of engineers and global business executives to set-up its 20,000 square foot facility. The facility in Pau, France will also offer educational programs to SigEx Foundry clients on a global basis through distance learning. The SigEx Foundry will be accepting research grant applications and PhD candidates in: telecommunications, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, economics and business, and marketing communications practices.

Description of the SigEx Foundry

The SigEx Foundry projects for SigEx will support numerous technology leaders including : SAP, Vivendi, SONY, AOL Time Warner, eBay, Cisco, IBM, Sun, Apple, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and international carriers. The mandate to build the new communications industry and support existing telecommunications infrastructures will be deployed with Fortune 1000 strategic customers.

The SigEx Foundry is much more than a think tank where great ideas get nurtured. The SigEx Foundry is a concentrate of "real life" so that not only the ideas, but also the teams, the technology, the revenue models and the culture are tested against real live situations to see whether they have the right to succeed in the outside world. Validation includes publications and patents, strategic customers as well as financial modeling and analysis. A short intense process creates the right competitive environment to breed excellence.

The training also includes new advanced technology methodologies such as extreme programming or user profiling and business methodologies like Real Options, Fifth Discipline and Strategic Marketing. And, let us not forget Enhanced Communications training at all layers of technologies from chips to applications. Thus, the SigEx Foundry’s re-training and job creation delivers excellence and positions the new Enhanced Communications industry on a successful path.

Components of the SigEx Foundry

Candidates enter the SigEx Foundry on a voluntary basis and do not pay for the training they receive in the SigEx Foundry. Though the SigEx Foundry values candidates with certain profiles, all candidates are at the same level when entering the SigEx Foundry. Team leaders step up to taking the lead and will need to prove and show their ability to lead, recruit and attract customers and capital. Not all candidates will make it through the SigEx Foundry (into a successful project) as not every candidate will manage to reinvent himself to Enhanced Communications. Other options are available to those candidates.

The management team includes a director to oversee the day to day operations, an IP/Patent specialist to manage intellectual property within the Foundry projects, translators to ensure localization of all documents, a recruitment person, a strategic communications person working in conjunction with our communications agency and assistants and MIS people.

SigEx Foundry trainers are not necessarily full time and provide the necessary courses on technical, economic and business material that the team need to understand for their projects.

The SigEx Ventures investment fund provides pre-funding for all projects presented to the Foundry. Dedicated fundraisers will be hired in the Foundry to support the constant fundraising process around Enhanced Communications projects.

By providing Distance Learning, the SigEx Foundry will enable multi-Foundry collaboration, access to course material not available locally and services to other locations on courses provided in the SigEx Foundry.

Professional services is a consistent activity of the SigEx Foundry to address immediate customer needs and project deployment needs. Candidates will be recruited from within the SigEx Foundry for these groups.

Research is an essential part of making progress on Enhanced Communications. Patents and publications are generated on a regular basis and collaboration with existing scientific labs as well as PhD programs is promoted.

Origin of candidates

In its search for excellence, the SigEx Foundry will seek a large number of candidates to allow everyone a chance to be part of an Enhanced Communications project core team. This team will in turn grow through success and hire other candidates in the process.

Candidates need to fit into one of the three following profiles:

Engineers and researchers (60% of candidates) with little to significant experience/expertise in telecommunications, electronics and/or computer science (C++, Java, Microcode).


Business (20% of candidates) already experienced in high technology fields, capable of delivering business plans and build and present revenue models.


Strategic communications (20% of candidates) capable of building and communicate strategic plans in collaboration with a network of public relations agencies.


The origin of candidates is therefore as diverse as the situation they can currently be in.

Retraining process

The retraining cycle of the SigEx Foundry is a three month process with the ability to go back to the beginning of the process on a case by case basis. The process starts again every month (thus three cycles are always under way). The goal for each candidate is to get out of the SigEx Foundry as soon as possible, if possible as part of a successful team that has been validated by the process.

The validation process is a very intense and competitive one in order to select only the best to lead the Enhanced Communications projects. Only small teams of excellence can provide sustainable growth and lead the industry into this paradigm shift. The projects developed in the Foundry are all pre-funded and are sustainable for a period of 12 to 18 month. Each budgetary decision within a project needs to comply to this sustainability rule.

The process is composed of three phases, each lasting a month:

First phase: validation by peers

The first phase includes a lot of training material. Complete projects (business plans, strategic communications plan, presentations, executive summary) are presented to the candidates in different pieces. The candidates are recruited by a project leader and the team must make the project its own, by reconstructing the business plan, presenting models (revenue, business, technology and cultural) to the other team leaders.

Each project has three teams working on it in order to create competitiveness and complementarities. At the end of this phase, the peers decide on which team has earned the right to move to the second phase. Other teams either quit or may, on a case by case basis, start the process again.

Second phase: market validation

Once successfully selected by their peers, the projects are presented to the founders' strategic customers (see biography and other projects). The customers will confirm the validity of the project and the ventureability of the team. Strategic customers will then enter into an alpha/beta deployment contract regarding the development and deployment of the particular technology.

Third phase: investor validation

At this point, the teams present to SigEx Ventures shareholders and other interested investors (local investors for instance) for final validation. All these investors have had the opportunity to follow the validation process and approve of the team they are being presented with.

At this point, the project is ventureable, the team is hired on indefinite contract with stock options and bonus program.