Celebrating Unconventional Thinking

See the Winners

CELEBRATING UNCONVENTIONAL INNOVATION

Innovation in Customer Experience

The transformative potential of technology is about more than devices, networks and clouds—it’s driven by the innovative spirit of the people who apply it to solve problems. Those creative, collaborative thinkers who have utilized the power of connectivity in service of people are being celebrated by T-Mobile for Business through the 2024 Unconventional Awards. The winners, notes Mo Katibeh, chief marketing officer at T-Mobile Business Group, have all demonstrated a dedication to superior experience. “The Unconventional Awards help bring to life just incredible examples of how 5G and these bleeding-edge technologies can be used by businesses of all types in driving new outcomes while serving critical audiences,” Katibeh says. “Witnessing how these winners have creatively leveraged T-Mobile’s tools, infrastructure and 5G solutions to address real problems is inspiring and reinforces our commitment to innovation.” Read on to learn more about this year’s first place winners.

About the Awards

For those with profound autism, even a trip in the family car can expose a host of challenges and triggers, making it unsafe for everyone involved. “Some people with autism have trouble keeping their seatbelts on. Traffic, stopping at a stoplight or even a parent having to take a different route can be a trigger,” says Dr. Paula Pompa-Craven, chief clinical officer at Easterseals Southern California (ESSC). “We have participants who will not leave the home or ride in a car.” These barriers, Pompa-Craven says, put people with autism at risk for a wide range of negative health and quality-of-life outcomes. To fulfill its mission of full equity, inclusion and access for the people it supports, ESSC has long prioritized the application of technological solutions. To address this need, it turned to a novel application of VR—staging those triggers in a virtual setting so participants, working with a clinician, can safely practice skills to reduce dangerous behaviors while riding in a car.

Employees also experience “Infosys Immerse” (powered by Infosys Virtual Living Labs), a unique and engaging 3D metaverse specifically designed to help them understand Infosys culture and receive essential messages from leadership. “This is a mobile-first application,” Mathew adds, “and is supported through reliable 5G connectivity so that lagging performance does not negatively impact experience.”

Sony Electronics and CBS Sports: The Next Step in Fan Experience

Innovation in Industry

Infosys: Boosting Employee Experience

Amid global competition for talent, the ability to deliver transformative experiences for employees is critical to business success. More than ever, employees expect technology to serve them with immersive, consumer-grade experiences in their professional lives, just as it does when they’re off the clock. That’s the mindset behind the Infosys Employee Experience Platform, says Shaji Mathew, group head of human resources at Infosys. “Enabling employees on the technologies, domains and business knowledge required to support our clients is key,” he says. “We completely digitized the employee support process, from onboarding up through retirement.” The platform includes three parts: Launchpad, which covers the end-to-end hiring journey; InfyMe (aka Orbit), an AI-powered engagement and productivity tool designed to help personalize and guide employees to create a blueprint for career growth; and Lex (aka Wingspan), the gamification-enhanced learning suite designed to help build necessary skills.

3AM Innovations: Putting Digital Eyes on Firefighters

Innovation in Community

ESSC partnered with Floreo, a VR company, to help translate its expertise in autism services into a transportation safety curriculum. T-Mobile for Business ensured the supporting network had the powerful connectivity required for it to perform effectively. Pompa-Craven believes the program can have a tremendous impact over time, helping participants and caregivers not only make necessities like medical visits less challenging, but also promote inclusion in ways most of us take for granted. “We want to give people the tools to enhance their quality of life,” she says.

In Quincy, Massachusetts, the local fire department transitioned FLORIAN to T-Mobile’s 5G network and saw significant improvements in performance and reliability over their previous provider. The enhanced network capabilities ensured more timely and accurate support for firefighters, underscoring the importance of a robust connectivity solution in critical situations. “FLORIAN provides critical situational awareness,” O’Connor says. “It’s boosting efficiency and making firefighters safer.”

Firefighters face immense challenges, whether navigating burning buildings in dense urban centers or battling remote wildfires. Ensuring their safety relies on precise “accountability”—knowing their exact location in real time. Traditional two-way radios, while durable, often fall short in accuracy and communication reliability, especially under duress. That can put firefighters in danger, says Patrick O’Connor, president and co-founder of 3AM Innovations. “A firefighter can be disoriented inside a building, and in a time of need a commander outside may end up sending a team to the wrong place to provide help, and time is lost,” he says. 3AM Innovations addresses these challenges with their FLORIAN system—a sophisticated platform that integrates smartphone technology and AI to deliver accurate real-time location tracking, monitor firefighter activity and equipment, and detect environmental changes. The system is especially effective when operating on advanced 5G networks, which provide the capacity, speed and coverage needed to fully support these features, enhancing firefighter safety and efficiency.

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Learn more about The Unconventional Awards and how your innovative thinking might be recognized.

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

Lorem Ipsum Dolor ET Sit Amet Quis

Innovation in Employee Enablement

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Easterseals Southern California is using connectivity to help people with autism access transportation safely.

A private 5G network developed by T-Mobile and Sony Electronics helped CBS Sports create a better broadcast viewing experience for golf fans.

3AM Innovations is using connectivity to help keep firefighters safe, no matter the environment in which they’re working.

Easterseals Southern California: A More Inclusive Vision

T-Mobile for Business is helping connect tennis fans to the game in exciting and deeply engaging new ways.

T-Mobile for Business gives Disney StudioLAB the ability to bring its creators together—any time, any place.

Boston Children’s Hospital developed innovative connectivity solutions that benefit clinicians and enable better care.

In collaboration with T-Mobile for Business, see how the winners of The Unconventional Awards are standing out and innovating on their own terms.

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“There’s this co-occurrence between autism spectrum disorders and mental health. And we have unfortunately a lot of teens, young adults who won’t leave their homes. They really are staying home. And so if this is another way that we can support them to leave their homes, to go out into the community, to socialize more, to do more things, then I think this is serving multiple purposes.” Dr. Paula Pompa-Craven, Chief Clinical Officer, Easterseals Southern California

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“We could have more cameras in more places. We could actually have a goalpost camera. We could have a home plate camera wirelessly connected. This could be used for live concerts. For news where if something happens around the corner from the office, the camera person could run there not worrying about the connectivity, but start shooting. International press conferences, elections of course. So this technology does have many places that it could go to.” Kento Sayama, Deputy Vice President, Imaging Solutions, Sony Electronics

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“If you’re disoriented inside and I’m giving you my location where I believe I am to come get me, if the commander outside doesn’t really know where you are, now they’re sending a team to go try to find you, more time’s wasted. And then also it causes more issues because then that team going in to find you, they could get lost.” Patrick O’Connor, President, Co-Founder, 3AM Innovations

When everything goes fine, yes, it's expected. When something is not working in line with your expectation, definitely you'll feel like I need a better experience, I need a better app. But it has to be working in line with your expectation… Chandra Mouli, Senior Director, Infosys

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Innovation in Employee Enablement

According to data from the Washington State Department of Transportation, in the City of Bellevue, Washington, nearly half of all traffic deaths and serious injury crashes between 2013 and 2022 involved a person walking or bicycling. But what if vehicles could seamlessly communicate with each other and the city’s traffic infrastructure, delivering safety information to drivers and heading off potentially dangerous confrontations between cars and people before they happen? That’s the goal behind Bellevue’s cellular-vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) application—a safe driving solution that can be integrated into a car’s connectivity software as part of Vision Zero, an international program dedicated to eliminating traffic injuries and fatalities. The project will leverage T-Mobile’s award-winning 5G network to establish reliable and low-latency connections, enabling vehicles and traffic infrastructure to exchange information and notifications about pedestrians and cyclists in near real time. “Connectivity is critical for this system to work, and latency—the delay between one device transmitting information and being received by another device—is mission critical when milliseconds are what can avoid a tragic outcome,” says Franz Loewenherz, mobility and solutions manager, City of Bellevue. “You might say T-Mobile is the glue bringing together these disparate technology components.”

Infosys’ holistic, immersive end-to-end modernization of the “hire-to-retire” journey relies on robust connectivity and AI.

Innovation in Employee Enablement

Every year, the world’s best golfers convene for the PGA Championship, one of the sport’s most prestigious events. But this year, it wasn’t just the athletes making history. For the first time, a private 5G network was deployed to wirelessly support a live event broadcast. This included specially designed Sony 5G wireless cameras, innovative low-latency video codecs (software that compresses and decompresses data files) and cutting-edge portable data transmitter technology capable of providing the stable, high-speed connectivity necessary to cover a live sports event at an elite level. Developing the capacity to work wirelessly over a space as sprawling as a championship golf course required extensive collaboration and stakeholders with diverse skill sets, notes Kento Sayama, deputy vice president, imaging solutions at Sony Electronics. Together, they worked to enhance the fan experience, whether on-site or at home.

“T-Mobile brought in a separate, private 5G network dedicated to this project and was supportive of doing not only lab tests but also tests out in the field to make sure we could make it work,” he says. “And CBS Sports, of course, brought decades of sports production experience.” That spirit of innovation has the potential to more efficiently create and capture amazing broadcast moments, helping fans experience even more action. Anything broadcast live can be improved with the greater speed, agility and flexibility of 5G. “This technology has so many places it could go,” Sayama says.

Innovation in Employee Enablement

Infosys

Innovation in Industry

Sony Electronics and CBS Sports

Innovation in Community

3AM Innovations

The Tipping Point

UMiami Dept. of Informatics and Health Data Science

Innovation in Customer Experience

Easterseals Southern California

Innovation in Customer Experience

Easterseals Southern California

Innovation in Employee Enablement

Infosys

Innovation in Industry

Sony Electronics and CBS Sports

Innovation in Community

3AM Innovations

The Tipping Point

UMiami Dept. of Informatics and Health Data Science

UMiami Dept. of Informatics and Health Data Science: Changing the Direction of Healthcare

How connected devices help the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine provide care and access for underserved patients.

The Tipping Point

Deploying the program effectively meant addressing health equity questions and the digital divide. Partnering with T-Mobile for Business, Seixas and his team ensured patients wouldn’t just have the monitoring devices, but the connectivity needed to give them value. “Anyone in our care, they don’t have to worry about having their own phone or an internet connection,” he says. “T-Mobile leaped at the opportunity to help us push the boundaries of innovation and access in advanced healthcare monitoring.”

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“There’s a story to be told about everyone’s disease and our job is to be scientific detectives to fully understand that. So that’s the discovery side. Once we’ve established what are the unique causes of that particular disease, we believe as an enterprise that we should then unleash all potential therapies that have been proven to work on a particular patient or a profile of a patient.” Dr. Azizi Seixas, Interim Inaugural Chair of the Dept. of Informatics and Health Data Science and Director of the Media and Information Lab (MIL) at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine

Many people in communities traditionally underserved by medical infrastructure aren’t introduced to care until long after problems develop. Closing that gap means bringing healthcare directly to them, says Dr. Azizi Seixas, interim inaugural chair of the Department of Informatics and Health Data Science and director of the Media and Information Lab (MIL) at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. That is the purpose behind the “MIL Box,” a package of seven smart devices and a wireless router known as a MiFi to connect the suite of technology. “It’s a novel approach to remote patient monitoring,” Seixas says. “We’re integrating multiple advanced health monitoring devices into a single cohesive system.” The data generated provides a holistic understanding of not only what’s happening to the patient’s body, but also the environment in which they live. Are there airborne pollutants, for example, that could lead to respiratory illness? Clinicians can then intervene before that person lands in an emergency room or has developed more advanced disease. Comprehensive data even allows Seixas and his team to create digital twins of every patient, helping add precision and personalization to care plans.

The Award Winners

Innovation in Customer Experience Easter Seals

CBS Sports/Sony: The Next Step In Fan Experience

How a private 5G network developed by T-Mobile and Sony helped create operational efficiencies that broadcast viewing experiences for golf fans everywhere.

Innovation in Industry

“T-Mobile brought in a separate, private 5G network dedicated to this project, to enhance the fan experience on-site and at homeand was supportive of doing not only lab tests but also tests out in the field to make sure we could make it work,” he says. “And CBS Sports, of course, brought decades of sports production experience.”

That spirit of innovation has the potential to create greater efficiencies to capture and create amazing broadcast moments, helping fans experience even more action. Anything broadcast live can be improved from the greater speed, agility and flexibility of 5G. “This technology has so many places it could go,” Sayama says.

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The Tipping Point

Innovation in Community

Innovation in Industry

Innovation in Employee Enablement

Innovation in Customer Experience