Finnish study on the decline of Nokia’s mobile phone business draws record readership
The article ”has drawn readers from around the world, with 90 percent of its downloads coming from outside Finland.
The broad interest shows that Nokia is not just a Finnish story, but a case that resonates internationally with researchers of business history and technology leadership, business executives, and students.
“It is great that our relatively complex study with its open approach to the research subject has found such a large and high-quality readership," says the lead author of the article, Juha-Antti Lamberg, Professor of Strategy and Economic History from the Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics.
The other authors were Rector Jari Ojala from the Ģֱ, Product Manager Sandra Lubinaitè from Telia and Professor of Marketing Henrikki Tikkanen from Aalto University.
Nokia’s strategic mistakes in focus
The study demonstrates that Nokia’s difficulties with its competition, specifically phones with the Android operating system and Apple’s iPhone, were not due to individual managers but a lack of time and the fragmentation of resources, which prevented the corporation from developing a competitive smartphone in time.
From 2007 to 2010, Nokia continued to develop its Symbian operating system in spite of its evident technical problems. At the same time, they were developing or working with new operating systems (Meego, Meltemi, Android), but these were completed too late or not at all. Nokia’s leadership believed in the management model of strategic agility, which generated internal competition and organisational changes. This impeded Nokia’s capability for renewal and hampered their long-term product development strategy.
“The case of Nokia shows how important it is to find a balance between agility and strategic consistency,” says Henrikki Tikkanen, Professor of Marketing from Aalto University.
“Excessive internal competition dispersed resources at a crucial moment when speed and concentration of resources would have been vitally important. Eventually, the competitors took over.”
Significance of open-access publishing
The exceptionally large number of readers of this article also shows the importance of open-access publishing.
“The large number of downloads is undoubtedly due to the general interest in this topic,” Lamberg says, “but without open-access publication these numbers would not have been possible. This shows the importance of open access for research knowledge.”
According to this study, Nokia’s case is particularly interesting to technology corporations, which can learn from these experiences.
History is not just studying the past, but it can and should be learned from,” says Jari Ojala, Rector of the Ģֱ.
Impacts of chance and non-implemented plans on strategy
After the Business History article, the research team has continued their research on Nokia’s history and strategy. A study on the effect of chance on Nokia’s major strategic choices was published in .
At present, the research team is completing their study on unimplemented plans related to Nokia’s evolution and their long-term effects. A new project funded by the Research Council of Finland is exploring the concept of near-histories – strategic decisions and trends that were anticipated but never realised.
This study was conducted by Juha-Antti Lamberg, Eero Vaara from the University of Oxford, Pasi Nevalainen from the JYU Department of History and Ethnology, and Henrikki Tikkanen from Aalto University. It provides a new perspective on how unrealised futures influence decision-making and strategies in organisations.
A near-history can provide an organisation with a mirror to the future
Traditional strategy research is focused on realised decisions and learning from the past, but a new study, to be published later this year, sheds light on how strategic plans, failed corporate acquisitions and other unrealised plans can shape decision-making and the direction of an organisation.
Based on this study, strategic near-histories engender “temporal disequilibrium”, where organisations react to imagined but unrealised futures as if they were real.
These anticipative reactions, then again, trigger the mobilisation of resources and the setting of new priorities within the organisation, which can lead to strategic changes even if the anticipated development is never realised.
The study applies microhistorical methods and focuses on two episodes of near-history in the 1970s and 1980s. The first looks at the threat of nationalisation and the resulting transformation of Nokia into an electronics corporation. The second episode concerns plans for collaboration with Volvo involving a Nokia car capable of autonomous driving. This plan turned out to be utopian, but it led to the redistribution of resources in Nokia’s product development and eventually to Nokia’s strong position in the car electronics market.
The results show that near-histories influence long-term strategic development, serving as a mirror through which organisations define what they consider possible or impossible in the future.
Organisations do not react solely to what happens,” Lamberg says. “Their strategies are also shaped by things that could have happened, but never did."
“By analysing near-histories, we can understand how strategy is directed not only by past decisions, but also by imagined and unrealised futures.”
