Innovation in Business: The Nokia Story
What the fall of Nokia in the smartphone industry can teach you about innovation
Innovation and disruption seem to be buzzwords for businesses these days, however, many still fail to do so. It should go without saying that innovation can massively differentiate your business’ value proposition. It can move you from market player to market leader.
However, as much as the sustained future of your business may depend on innovation. It is not always a straight path and it could lead to devastating losses. So how do you go about creating a culture of innovation in your business?
In the late 2000s Nokia, one of the biggest mobile phone manufacturers boasted that the original iPhone and all it stood for would never work. By 2011, it was already in decline. In 2013 it as acquired by Microsoft. Prior to all these, Nokia was known for being innovative. In fact, the smartphone industry could arguably have been birthed through Nokia’s Symbian os. So how did one of the most innovative and leading phone manufacturer in the ’90s and early 2000s fall to become the 15th largest smartphone maker with barely 0.7% of the global smartphone market share?
Here are 3 things they did wrong that you should avoid.
They Didn’t Pay Attention To The Market And Their Customers
This may sound contradictory. Tech geeks would remember Nokia’s Symbian os. It brought multitasking, robust apps and If Nokia introduced the world to smartphones how did they lose the smartphone wars.
One major area was in software. Nokia’s Symbian os could not compete with the iPhone and Android OS. Compared to these newer OSes Symbian felt outdated and clunky. It also did not help that the world hallmark of the smartphone experience was the ability to use apps. Unlike with feature phones, android and ios made it easy and lucrative for app developers to create applications for their operating systems. However, Nokia’s Symbian didn’t, which meant that fewer developers were willing to create apps for the Symbian os, making Symbian phones less desirable.
It should be noted that Nokia later created MeeGo OS to address this problem, but it was too late. IOS and android had dominated the market making it impossible for them to make a significant mark in the smartphone space.
Nokia’s late response to the market and its customer’s needs was a major reason their grip on the smartphone market fell.
Hire The Right People And Let Them Do Their Jobs
Studies show that another reason that Nokia fell was that it had a toxic culture of organisational fear between senior executives and the market realities and the middle management and the senior executives.
In a nutshell, the top executives were too afraid the acknowledge that the Symbian os was not optimized for the current market realities and in turn middle management were too afraid to air their view for the fear of getting fired.
If you spend time hiring smart people to help move your business goals, then allow them to do their work.
This piece of advice may seem like common sense but the toxic culture of dictatorial leadership is rampant in many organisations. It is hard to let go of ego and the feeling of being wrong, but think about it this way, you are paying them so that you don’t have to stress yourself by being right all the time.
Test, Test, Test
This advice isn’t necessarily a lesson from Nokia’s failure, but it definitely could have saved them.
I mentioned previously that business innovation is not a linear process. It is a scary process and is not guaranteed that every your bid to innovate would be rewarded. Hence, the reason Nokia fell could be because they were too afraid to try something new, knowing fully that attempts at innovation are not always successful.
However, the fear could have been mitigated by testing their ideas on a small scale. They could have tested on getting app developers more engaged in Symbian os. They could have test-run MeeGo early on. They could have tested Nokia android phones.
But what does this mean for your business?
If you have great ideas to improve something in your business, then test it with your employees of your most loyal customers. Explain that it is a test and collect feedback. This would not only show you the potential or lack of merit there is in that idea, but it could also show you what to tweak while fostering more goodwill between you and your customers.
Lastly, innovation can happen internally and externally. You can experiment with ways to foster an amazing working culture in your business as much as you can experiment with ways to create and deliver on your products and services to your customers.
Sources
Why did Nokia fail and what can you learn from it? — BRAND MINDS
How Nokia Lost its Pace in the Smartphone Race — Ola Onikoyi
