Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of Nokia Research Center. I happened to be in Helsinki to attend a strategy workshop on Thursday, and arriving a day early enabled me to attend the festivities at the main office of NRC. Antti-Jussi Suominen was the master of ceremonies in an event that featured presentations by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (CEO of Nokia), Pero Ojanperä (CTO of Nokia) and Bob Iannucci (Head of NRC). The emphasis of the event was in alignment with the mission of NRC: renewal.
A number of NRC’s successes from the distant and recent past were highlighted, e.g. the Nokia Communicator 9000 in 1996 and the announcement of Wibree last week. These celebrations were accompanied by a warning against complacency (an attitude whose dire, Orwellian consequences I commented on in an earlier post). Recent organizational changes have given NRC researchers new freedoms and tools for taking more risks, engaging in longer term research and looking further out, creating or at least preparing for potential disruptions over the horizon. To this end, Bob encouraged NRC researchers to "follow your dreams".
There are, of course, still processes and constraints intended to help focus the research at NRC, but from all that I’ve heard in the little over 20 days I’ve been with the organization (and so all of this should be taken with a grain or two of salt), NRC is embracing a new model of openness, both internally and in its external relationships, and doing away with some of the hierarchical structures that may have unnecessarily innovation in the past. As I noted in my Orwellian post, hierarchies do have a way of regenerating themselves in human societies of any kind, so it will be interesting to see how this flatter organizational plan evolves.
One of the interesting aspects of Wednesday’s celebration, to me, was that although Nokia is a technology company, there was a strong emphasis on personalities and relationships that have come and gone over the history of NRC. As one of the other speakers noted, long after the technologies have faded, the personalities persist. The influence of personalities — and the willingness to take risks — are also echoed in several places throughout The Nokia Revolution, a book by Dan Steinbock I recently started, and I hope that this new spirit of open innovation will allow the personalities within Nokia Research Center — and the personality of NRC — to shine forth more clearly.