Nokia success

Regaining Strategic Agility Success and market leadership often turn strategic agility into strategic rigidity. Cognitive Broadening Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Nokia was characterized by a tension between the focused cognition on operational success in the core business and the broadened cognition of planting seeds of renewal. The narrow focus jeopardized strategic sensitivity, while the broadened focus fostered strategic sensitivity.

Corporate ventures, and their informal equivalent within NMP, allowed experiential learning around, and away from, the core businesses. Some of these ventures were positioned, and justified, as fitting with the core 3G trajectory of Nokia’s development. They obtained commitment and resources, but in fact were used to explore new growth avenues.23 By giving enough independence to Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Nokia was characterized by a tension between the focused cognition on operational success in the core business and the broadened cognition of planting seeds of renewal. The narrow focus jeopardized strategic sensitivity, while the broadened focus fostered strategic sensitivity.

The relative informality of the process and the variety and number of ventures launched over a relatively short time frame called for intense discussions. The structuring of these discussions around the forums described earlier allowed for a richer strategic dialogue among a wider group of executives and professionals than just top management or a separate venture group. In the NMP process, the dialogue was even more direct and intense as the innovative efforts were run informally within the same organization as the core business,

under the sponsorship of the executive also leading Sales and Marketing for Europe (Nokia’s core region at that time). The ongoing strategic dialogue around ventures maintained a level of strategic sensitivity across a broad cadre of people who might otherwise have been fully absorbed with operational concerns. The co-existence within NMP of pressures for operational excellence and of seeds of renewal created a healthy tension.

Although the belief in 3G primacy was strong and central, it was not totally overwhelming. Sometimes, as with WLAN, Nokia was too early, losing its interest to this technology for a while only to learn later that this was indeed an important area. Sometimes, as with the first “communicator,” products did not succeed commercially, but the learning and understanding they brought were acknowledged and used subsequently.