Nokia - Fostering Innovation

The vision and mission of Nokia played a very important role in fostering innovation. Nokia's vision was to create and operate in, what the company calls, "an inclusive environment." An inclusive environment refers to a culture which emphasizes individual and cultural differences and seeks to benefit from these differences.

Nokia believed that diversity is one of the key determinants of success, as it increased creativity, mirrored the marketplace, and improved the attraction and retention of human resources, among other things. An inclusive environment seeks and values diversity with a view to benefiting from it...

The R&D set up at Nokia was rather different from that of other companies. While most large companies had centralized R&D facilities with tall hierarchical structures to facilitate strict control over processes and research, Nokia's R&D operations were scattered across the world in 69 sites, and its 19,579 (as on December, 2002) engineers, designers and sociologists were given complete freedom to operate and develop their own ideas, over and above their officially designated research projects. The structure was flat and most of the employees reported directly to the head of R&D...