Foresight without Leadership

Techcrunch published an article - Innovate or die : NOKIA's long drawn out decline ; that discusses NOKIA R&D pioneering the concepts but unable to make it fly -

Leach points to the example of the Nokia Communicator – a pioneering forerunner of today’s smartphones, which launched way back in 1996 — as an example of how Nokia failed to deliver on its own great potential. While the device included the ability to download apps, Nokia missed the opportunity to capitalise on them long before anyone else could have.  “Nokia felt that downloading apps and all of that was only something a minority of people would do,” he says. “It wasn’t really the main point, no one would get that concept. And then a couple of years later you have Apple doing a mainstream TV commercial about downloading apps to your phone.

The ability to download apps directly to your phone and use an app-store were both innovations/ideas that NOKIA could have blown out of proportion if they were able to capitalize on it early. They did launch OVI store formally but it turns out people had jumped the Apple & Google App-Store band-wagon.

References :

• Innovate or die : NOKIA's long drawn out decline
• NOKIA's chief faces culture complacency

Credits : NOKIA Logo ® is a trademark of NOKIA, Finland, Logo collage referenced from techcrunch.com article.