In the incredibly competitive mobile carrier market, it’s important to stay on the cutting-edge of new technologies and consumer products. That means carriers have entire teams dedicated to what is essentially technology scouting.

RCR Wireless News Editor-in-Chief Dan Meyer discussed this role with Sprint Business Development Manager Christina Claure during the recent Telecom Council Innovation Showcase, held in Sunnyvale, California.

Claure’s is based in Silicon Valley, co-located with a team from SoftBank, Sprint’s Japanese parent company, and is tasked with keeping abreast of startup companies, university research teams and other sources of innovation that could impact the telecom industry.

“We do a lot of investigation,” she said. “There’s always new things coming around the corner. You can sometimes see a wave of a particular type of technology coming across.”

She said a major priority for Sprint is “digitization” that will enable customers to “come online and…do the kind of things they used to do over the phone.”

Sprint, which is going through a dramatic $2 billion-plus cost cutting program, along with a corporate restructuring and massive network improvement initiative, is focused on cutting costs, improving service for existing customers and winning new customers, Claure said.

Without giving too much away, she said the Innovation Showcase features “some interesting NFV/SDN companies, some interesting things to do with big data. Innovation is, from the very top-down, something that’s very important to Sprint.”

Claure also gave tips to startups and other groups in the position of pitching to Sprint.

“The obvious thing…is do a little bit of homework ahead of time. Study up on what Sprint’s doing, is not doing. One of the things that we are well aware of is the problem in the industry. A lot of companies will start their presentation by…going into great details about the problem. I think you can fairly adequately guess that we know what the problem is. We’re really looking to see how you differentiate your product from others in that space and how you’d work with us. Tell me why I’d care.”