At today’s meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit we had an interesting talk from Pekka Pohjakallio, VP of Concepting and Innovation at Nokia. Because of the ban on flights he was unable to attend in person so we had a voice over IP link to go with his powerpoint presentation. He covered a tremendous amount of ground in his talk and in the subsequent Q&A session. He explained the philosopy of innovation at Nokia and the efforts they make to embed it into the corporate culture. I will not try to paraphrase what he said but I will give you some quotations that I think are of high value:
“In Nokia we believe that nothing is an innovation until it is in the hands of the consumer.
In the early days of the cable business financial constraints forced us to be innovative. We could not afford to develop our own processors and had to use standard chips so we had to find ways to be different.
We made a big bet on GSM and fortunately this paid off.
R&D spend is 14% of net sales.
Nokia is now the biggest camera manufacturer in the world.
Most of our innovation is design led rather than technology led. For example we offer language training and horoscope applications in India.
Nintendo Wii and Guitar Hero are good examples of design led innovation.
We believe that teams need to be as cross-disciplined as possible.
When we put together the team to work on an initial concept we try to think it right through to what will be in the launch press release.
We talk to the people who are the far extremes – the geekiest of the geeks.
A big challenge for us is how to make our teams independent. How can we give them enough freedom?
We focus on ‘what is the user problem we are trying to solve?’ Then we prototype, prototype, prototype.
We have an intranet where people can post videos of their ideas.
We crowdsource internally by asking all our people to help with a problem.
We collaborate externally with suppliers and Universities. A lot of our innovation comes from our partners.
Our message to small companies with ideas is, ’Don’t be afraid. Approach us.’
We want to be the world’s best partnering company.
Innovation is not a separate thing – in Nokia it is part of what you do.”
I would like to express our thanks to Pekka and to Anno Koetje for the efforts they made to make the event a success despite all the travel and logistical challenges.
Paul Sloane
Today’s meeting of the BQF Innovation Unit discussed the issue of Competency Traps. The session was led by Richard Granger of Arthur D Little. He presented a comprehensive review of the topic and then facilitated a workshop where delegates assessed their organisational competence in 7 key areas. Competency traps are skills, attributes and things we are proud of, that constrain our thinking. They break down into a Vision trap, a Routinisation trap and Technology traps. Richard advised that the best way to combat these hazards is to open the organisation up to external stimuli. This led into a discussion of many aspects of open innovation and we reviewed what P&G, Rolls-Royce and Philips Research were doing in these areas. Seven key management capabilities were identified: