The Hindu Business Line : Nokia sets great store by open innovation

Helsinki, Nov. 11 Nokia, the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer, sets great store by ‘open innovation’ — a model in which problems faced by the company are thrown open to the public at large to come up with suggestions or solutions.

“I have a problem. My resources are finite,” says Mr Henry Tirri, Senior Vice-President and Head of Nokia Research Centre.

In order to overcome this problem, Nokia has been, in the last three years, working with over 120 academic institutions around the world.

“We are so serious about this that many of our labs are walking distance from the academic institutions,” Mr Tirri said.

Although academic institutions form the bulk of Nokia’s open collaborative innovation, the company is open to working with anybody — individuals, governments, NGOs.

A good example of open innovation is Nokia’s work with Cambridge University in the UK in the field of nano science. “Open innovation” is no longer an experiment, it is proven,” Mr Tirri said.

Global trend

The world is seeing a trend of companies moving towards open innovation. Wikipedia and Linux are obvious examples where anybody can jump in and offer a piece of knowledge or a solution for the good of people at large. But from a corporate perspective, Proctor & Gamble is credited with being a pioneer in this field, although Eli Lilly and IBM are also acknowledged to have done some work about the same time as P&G.

Eight years ago, P&G started what it called a ‘Connect+Develop’ programme, under which it would put a problem it faced on its Web site. Anybody could come up with a solution and get a suitable reward for it.

Nokia has been at it for the last three years. Nokia’s homegrown, Linux-based software Maemo, powers its Internet tablets and the to-be-launched N900, a computer-grade handset.