ICORA experimental platform
Those who innovate fast, at scale and with their partners will build markets and win new customers. This is the strategy for our large-scale experimental platform, ICORA.
Telenor is proud to be at the forefront of technological development, continuously innovating, exploring and co-creating with our customers, business units and partners.
The story of the current ICORA experimental platform starts in 2018, when Telenor was instrumental in the 5G-VINNI project, funded by Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation programme from 2014 to 2020.
Innovation at its core
With 5G-VINNI, Telenor and 22 partners created the first 5G experimental platform for the validation of industry use cases as well as 5G key performance indicators.
The name 5G-VINNI was a short form of “5G Verticals Innovation Infrastructure.” It signalled the ambition of accelerating European industry’s uptake of 5G by offering interconnected experimental platforms spread across Europe. With a viable business and ecosystem model, the platform could be supported during and beyond the span of the project.
5G-VINNI was inspiring. And when it ran its course in 2021, we continued to professionalise our experimental environments. We created ICORA: an Innovative, Cloud-native, Open, Resilient and Automated experimental platform.
What is the ICORA vision?
With ICORA, we aim to turn technology research into innovation opportunities for customers and partners. We and our partners are innovating together, leveraging our strengths, on a platform that is designed to give an easy-to-use and trustworthy environment for testing and experimenting. Not least, the platform itself combines technological components from many parties. It uses both pre-commercial and open-source technologies to explore, test and validate true vendor compatibility.
ICORA enables experiments with new services that address users and customers’ emerging needs in a more digitised world. Together with enterprise customers, we can deliver proof of concepts and showcase new solutions. Ultimately, we will help partners and customers understand the potential of connectivity and value-added applications and demonstrate value potential.
In turn, consumer and business markets can grow for both Telenor and partners. ICORA will be open to both customers (in various industries) and solution developers, establishing an ecosystem to co-create more value-added and customised services on top of the 5G and Beyond 5G network and connectivity services. For this purpose, multiple network instances will be created and evolved with specialised features and advanced technologies to meet the demands and expectations of the ICORA users. These instances will be tested by industrial stakeholders to prove value and potential for commercialisation and/or expansion into adjacent industries. Better knowledge of the performance of new technologies will support Telenor’s decision-makers when choosing platforms and vendors. We believe that ICORA will be a key innovation platform contributing to increased innovation pace and scale, with our customers, business units and partners.