Nokia

In class we’ve been talking a lot about change. Not just changing technology, but also changing corporate. Our panelists on Thursday talked even more about this. In our discussions we came across companies that willing to embrace change and some that are unwilling to embrace. We also talked about how this willingness or unwillingness to embrace change has affected their businesses. As the discussion continues, I came across an interesting article in the New York Times this past week about Nokia. Nokia is the world’s leading supplier of mobile phones controlling (as of June 2010) 40.3 percent of the world mobile phone market, down from 40.7 percent last year. In the United States, Nokia controls 8.1 percent of the mobile phone market, but in 2002 controlled 35 percent of this said market.

Nokia recently appointed a new CEO, Stephen Elop, and the article discusses the challenges he will face to changing the long standing corporate culture at Nokia, a culture of “complacency” and one heavily influenced by bureaucracy. According to the article Nokia developed a touch screen, internet ready mobile phone years before Apple released the IPhone. However, influenced by their own complacency and bureaucracy managers at Nokia killed the development of the mobile phone.

Now with a new CEO at its helm and it lags behind in the smartphone world, Nokia has reached a kind of cross road. How is the new CEO going to create a corporate culture that is conducive to innovation? How far reaching should these changes be? Or as the world leader in the mobile phone market, should they continue with what they’ve been doing thus far?