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Good telecommunication systems, especially wireless telecommunications play no small part in the development of effective IT strategies. Nokia also incorporates the same totally integrated management (TIM) in its operations as the ones used by other Level 3 IT users which is demonstrated through partnering strategies between clients and suppliers, compromising the standards of the open industry, and the supply chain management that the company uses on an international level. Because Nokia is one of the most successful players in the mobile telecommunications industry, this chapter concentrates on the strategies and technologies involved in how Nokia's products facilitate the strategies of leading IT users. Also, the chapter provides an account of Nokia's rise to success, and an examination of how IT is integrated within the company' demand and supply management system.

Recently, industrial economies are shifting towards informationalisation. At the forefront of this trend are the financial markets that adopted innovations brought about by these changes. The growth of various industries, especially in the field of telecommunications has become one of the factors behind Finland's economic achievement. Another factor is the county's use of a network management model which is also discussed briefly in this chapter. One of the companies that contributed to Finland's development is Nokia, one of the local companies that became successful in the telecommunications industry. An analysis of the relationship between Nokia and Finland in terms of politics and economics is also included in the chapter. The chapter goes on to discuss the management strategies that Nokia used in order to become a successful telecommunications company.

Chapter 5 concludes that the rapid economic growth of Finland in the 1990s based on the rise of the ICT sector cannot be explained by an innovation policy. A more credible explanation is the combination of deregulation in the late 1980s and Nokia's decision to focus on the digital GMS technology a few years before the international market of cellular phones started to explode. In order to be performative and able to create social reality, a policy paradigm — such as national innovation system — needs to be complemented by relevant policy instruments and tools. During the 1990s and 2000s the measurement and comparison of innovative performance of countries or ‘efficiency’ of national innovation systems became a fundamental tool of making innovation policy. It is not, however, possible to derive concrete policy advices or policy instruments from these comparisons.

This chapter addresses failures in the photography market (Kodak and Polaroid), computer market (Digital and Xerox), and communications market (Motorola and Nokia). Multi-level analyses are used to provide comparisons across case studies. It briefly reviews how these types of companies anticipate and manage failures. The notion of “creative destruction” is elaborated. These insights are used to foreshadow later discussions of failure management.

Finland was among the most aggressive and successful countries in the world in converting traditional industrial policies into new innovation policies. This chapter identifies the specific ways in which policymakers leveraged tight-knit networks to fundamentally restructure Finnish economic institutions. Together with entrepreneurial private sector actors, namely Nokia, they transformed Finland from one of the lowest technology economies in the OECD into one of the most research-intensive societies in the world. At the same time, the chapter reveals that Finland relied so heavily on technological innovation that it increased its vulnerability to adverse economic shocks, most notably the invention of the iPhone.

This chapter first discusses research and development in general, and then turns to the rapid growth of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry. It considers the phenomenal success of the Nokia Group and the major role it played in the Finnish growth process of the 1990s. However, the Finnish story is not only about Nokia; the chapter looks at the development and role of the larger Finnish ICT industry both over time and in comparison with some other countries.

This chapter focuses on the mobile gaming trend, along with the entertainment quotient of mobile phones. The introduction of the Snake game in mobiles by Nokia in 1997 was the start of the mobile game era, with the Asia Pacific region leading the world toward mobile gaming. The chapter presents a survey according to which women are likely to play an equal amount of mobile games as men, although there is a difference in download data. It shows an increase in the popularity of mobile gaming among people of every age group, although mobile gamers are more likely to be from a Hispanic, black, or Asian background. The chapter presents different categories of gamers, including hardcore gamers, causal gamers, and social gamers. Mobile TV, a new entertainment platform, is being tested on the commercial level, although people feel that it would hamper the primary use of the mobile, which is social interaction.

This chapter examines the development of open strategy practices from the late 1990s. Open strategy involves greater transparency about strategy to internal and external audiences, and greater inclusion for internal and external stakeholders. The contemporary rise of open strategy is supported by three exogenous forces: the dissolving of organizational boundaries internally and externally, a newly democratic working culture, and new technologies, especially social media. Nevertheless, open strategy’s development still involves two kinds of arduous and fallible institutional work: ‘rule-making’ and ‘resource-organizing’. As examples of the first, Gary Hamel’s Strategos Consulting promoted new kinds of democratic strategy norms, while corporates such as IBM developed internal openness through its jams. Under the second, new consulting firms were created such as Global Business Network, while established corporations such as Barclays Bank, Nokia, and Shell had to organize new kinds of participative strategy process.

No large industrial company has ever grown as fast as Nokia did in the 1990s and few have fallen quite as rapidly: Nokia’s mobile phone business went from posting record results in 2007 to almost dragging the whole company into bankruptcy in 2012. The opening chapter sets the scene with a brief history of Nokia’s journey. Three different lines of theoretical reasoning which could explain Nokia’s decline are discussed: unavoidable Schumpeterian creative destruction, organizational evolution gone astray, and a failure of managerial volition. The CORE dimensions used in the analysis of each chapter are introduced: Cognition (what leaders saw, how they interpreted it, conclusions they drew, and decisions made); Organization (operational actions, managers’ responsibilities, and relationships in the firm); Relationships (interpersonal element of how leaders complement each other, how well they work together, and the ambitions they harbor); and Emotions (critical to the quality of strategic sense-making and collective commitment).

From the Moment she started at Planta Maytag III in December 2004, Laura Flora’s financial circumstances turned bleak. She had earned much more during her peripatetic travels through tobacco fields and orange groves in the United States. In fact, Veracruzanos could sometimes earn an even better wage harvesting limes or picking chiles back in their rural villages than they did at the border. Flora felt demeaned by the low wages Maytag paid and found the work tedious and the factory culture oppressive and demoralizing. Yet she stayed. As a single mother, Flora lived on the razor’s edge of survival, but she had something her friends back in Tierra Blanca did not: steady work. Back in Veracruz, work ebbed and flowed with the weather, the seasons, and the rhythms of rural life. At the border, work was unrelenting, driven by the demands of global competition, time-discipline, and the ravenous consumer market to the north. It was the sheer volume of available jobs for unskilled workers—and the promise of overtime—that lured people like Flora to Reynosa. Based on income figures in 2004, about 50 million people in her country, 47 percent of the population, lived in poverty. With overtime Flora could cross the poverty threshold to move into the nonpoor half. The border was also where Flora, who turned 41 the week she began at Maytag, thought she could be a better parent. She had failed to sneak her three young girls into the United States in September, and now they were stuck in a place where they knew no one. But at least they would be together, unlike when Flora was in the United States with her two older children. And here in modernizing Reynosa, her daughters—if not herself—had a much better chance at getting ahead than they had had in Veracruz. “The education is better here, a lot better,” Flora reflected over a glass of sweet lemonade on a hot July afternoon in 2007. Her boyfriend, Arturo Mireles Guzman, agreed. The girls needed a technical profession, in his view.