Nokia’s open innovation drive

Open innovation is the buzzword. Recently, many companies have charted it out as a strategic initiative while pursuing out of box innovations. Google has been a powerhouse of internet innovations right from the inception. Two years back it triggered open innovation in the mobile industry by announcing Android, an open source mobile platform. Nokia, the market leader, was observing these moves with wide eyes. Though Nokia had been promoting collaborative efforts in development but was made to re-look their business roadmap. Nokia had a long strategic partner as Symbian who had been working with Nokia on their most popular platform for quite some time. Sensing the changing market dynamics, need of wide scale innovations and potential competition threat, Nokia decided to buy Symbian and decided to open it up as foundation. This is like “adding more costs and then giving out for free”. Well this surprised many industry pundits. Nokia had already been working to build up Services & Software business unit to earn revenues beyond devices. This was Nokia’s strategy for the future growth. Nokia is looking to cash on this move to build up innovative devices and services in the future. Nokia has already seen a good response to it with Ovj, its online portal, seeing large upload of mobile applications developed all over the world.

I was working with Nokia in midst of these developments. Suddenly Symbian became dearer to all of us. An organization wide reorganization took place. We got our new mission statement focusing on doing everything to change people’s lives. A team at senior management level took charge of this transition. A phase wise change management plan was worked out. Several horizontals were merged to create new verticals. New positions were opened up in the new setup. Few layoffs also happened during this transition due to work overlap at some positions. A sub-unit vertical was created for ex-Symbian employees and Symbian foundation. On 1^st June 2009, Nokia’s new organization took over. I was amazed to see the way information flow and the entire process was managed. Though our team was more or less shielded by these changes but we saw few people opting out for new positions inside Nokia. We had 2 ex-Symbian employees boarding our team. Innovation topped our team’s objectives from then.