"The service providers that are our major customers have recognised the next generation of innovative services is not something you go into [a] closet and invent and patent and spend three years launching it to the market," Collins says.
"Instead the market itself is creating some of these things, so an innovative new service needs to include engaging with the community and the people who are out there innovating and bring it back into the company in an open, innovative fashion." ng Connect is seen as a global ecosystem which brings together next-generation companies - there are about 70 signed up - to think through new service concepts and business models.
In New Zealand, it has already signed Solta Labs, which makes a video coding technology to allow video recorded at sports events and the like to be immediately streamed out to multiple devices.
"There is interesting stuff going on in New Zealand, but it is an isolated place," Collins says. "With ng Connect, we try to take some of those entrepreneurs and join them to a global network."
"We will see what happens with a product like Solta when you put it in a bigger context, maybe with an advertising platform or a retailer. You create something that is much larger by creating a context where they can sell it to service providers doing something different that they thought they could do."
The programme includes tools to exchange ideas, and one that allows members to track one another's interactions with other companies - and perhaps pass on advice.
For example, in trying to sell a product or service into a large corporate, small companies can often end up going through half a dozen different entry points - different VPs or departmental heads - without getting to the right person.
A single agreement allows collaboration to happen, without the flood of non-disclosure agreements and other paper that can quench entrepreneurial zeal.
While emphasising it's not the company line, Collins and Snodgrass express opposition to patenting ideas.
"I believe ideas are absolutely worthless," Collins says.
"It should be about execution, because every idea you have had has already been had by the entirety of the planet. The internet is one big brain and all ideas happen simultaneously, so the question is who can execute on it."
The classic example is the graphical user interface and computer mouse that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak saw on a visit to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre - the copier giant was never able to execute on many of the ideas being cooked up by its researchers.
Snodgrass says he has given all his team a copy of Jeremy Gutsche's 2009 book Exploiting Chaos: 150 ways to spark innovation in times of change.
"That is the mindset, because there is chaotic turnover in our environment. Everything is shifting, so it becomes a matter of working out where the opportunity points are in that chaos."
As well as Skout, Snodgrass has worked for a number of other start-ups. His CV includes researching emerging companies for dealmaker
media.com, a b2b media company, but his first entrepreneurial success was with Squaretrade, which sells warranties.
"I came in as a contractor to manage the warranty division," Snodgrass says. "They said, 'If you figure out how to sell this stuff, we'll see what happens,' so in six months I was managing a third of the company and making three times the revenue of the other divisions combined.
"It's a rush. That's why people are entrepreneurs - you want that stress and that pressure. I don't need a vacation. I just want success.
"Those are the types of guys you want to enable, because they are the ones who are going to reshape the planet. I think it's our duty as Alcatel-Lucent, which has a record of 100 years of innovation, to do some things to create that in the market again today.
"Most of the innovation you see today comes from these smaller companies, disrupting and overtaking the larger ones."
Small companies are more likely to have the flexibility required to keep changing the model until it works.
Snodgrass says that when he was selling Skout through the iTunes store, he was constantly having to tweak the package whenever Apple changed its algorithms.
"You could see sales suddenly plummet and you had to race in and figure out what they'd done," he says.
"Skout now has over six million people registered. It was a social network with 20,000 users when the Swedish guys who started it coaxed me to join over margaritas.
"We switched from a social network to a defined-use case that we knew we could monetise because we couldn't raise lot of money, so we had to start making money to grow the app."
While Skout is free to join, the site charges if people want to promote products across the site or to send someone gifts such as a virtual bunch of flowers.
"Switching from subscription to a virtual economy was an excellent move," Snodgrass says.
Collins says success is as much about business models as about technology, which is why companies like Alcatel-Lucent need to be on the lookout for new ways to do things, and share them with partners such as Telecom.
"The service providers are in a great spot. In a lot of cases they are the only people in this business consumers are paying money to, they sit as a trusted source, they have access to customers, yet they don't seem to be taking advantage of some of the new business models that are possible.
"This is an attempt to include them in that value chain."
