Source: Nokia
I had a chance to join a call with Henry Tirri, SVP of Nokia’s Research Center (NRC) to get an overview of the NRC’s strategy and focus.
Nokia operates 10 research centers worldwide, and Henry oversees them centrally from the center in Palo Alto, California. Previously, the research centers were islands to research being done in Finland. Over the past year, the research centers have been coordinated into an 11 island confederation with its capital in Palo Alto, working together on common themes while reporting eventually back to Helsinki. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, Nokia has been moving a lot of its multimedia research and development staff to the West Coast this past year, closer to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, where there’s a much larger of technology and content talent pool from which to draw upon.
NRCs 1o locations are:
- Palo Alto, CA
- Berkeley, CA
- Cambridge, UK
- Hollywood, CA
- Lausanne, Switzerland
- Helsinki, Finland
- Tampere, Finland
- Beijing, China
- Nairobi, Kenya
- Bangalore, India
The NRC does not represent the whole of R&D at Nokia, and it reports into Mary McDowell who heads up Nokia’s Corporate Development Group that is integrated across many of the firms’ business units.
Source: Nokia
The NRC’s mission statement for 2010 is—
“To explore technology frontiers, to solve scientific challenges today, for Nokia to deliver irresistible personal experiences tomorrow.”
Localized across the separate NRC islands are global research lab capabilities, advanced systems engineering efforts, business development and innovation operations, and strategy and operational excellence teams focused on fueling other strategy and open innovation teams around Nokia, as well as local marketing, financial, and legal support.
The NRC is currently working with 12o colleges and universities across the globe on future research efforts, leveraging them for recruiting, collaborative projects, facility sharing, and as think tanks and experimental labs to define new opportunities that may eventually reach the consumer market. Some of the more notable institutions include UC Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, UCLA, USC, and Tsinghua University. NRC focuses on future developments for all of the major continents around the world, as well as some specific vertical areas such as healthcare, grassroots business, education, navigation (landmark identification) and emergency response (black swan research).
The NRC’s main focus over the next year is on four distinct research areas:
- Rich Content Modeling
- High Performance Mobile Platforms
- New User Interfaces
- Cognitive Radio
Source: Nokia
One concept that Nokia is exploring is “Supersensing” or “Mixed Reality.” The later is a term coined by the research community at large. Mixed reality will offer at some point the capability to dramatically enhance a consumer’s interaction with his or her environment. This may be done through the use of sensors, geographic tagging, as well as community and social network tagging of locations and context-specific data tied to those locations.
This vision would allow a consumer to access a variety of interactive services surrounding them depending upon where they happen to be physically located in time. This could range from basic information services such as news and weather data to more location-specific services— such as having a list of services from a variety of retailer and hospitality establishments at their disposal, without even entering the premises. Today we have much of this information back on our PCs or Macs via an internet connection, or on our mobile device delivered via a web browser or widget. But Nokia’s working on conceptual visualization of all of these services on a mobile device, which is more than just grabbing an individual app off your smartphone to launch a hotel widget and make reservations.
Source: Nokia
Along with mixed reality work, Nokia and NRC has worked through an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Morph, a highly personalized device packed with sensors, services, and customizable features. Morph is a product of nanoscience collaboration with the University of Cambridge. The concept video has received millions of hits on YouTube and can be viewed here…
Nokia’s choice to string its global lab footprint into a collective of 11 separate but collaborating operating units focusing on one mission statement with four strategic goals shows the company’s commitment to developing research-based breakthroughs going forward. The company is also shifting more of its OS development efforts towards Maemo and open sourced platforms for future mobile devices, and also commented that it’s looking at WebOS as well. However, much of the NRC’s focus is on the areas previously discussed is only randomly looking at OS research.
Still, NRC is responsible for up to a third of Nokia’s IPR, specifically that focused on high-end user interface work, imaging and some elements of the company’s Ovi data and OS work as well as traffic research. NRC remains a key research and development advantage, especially with its ties to academia, to understanding the consumer, while developing future interactivity and mixed reality capabilities into multiple mobile environments around the world. While much of the media is focusing on the smartphone OS wars between Apple, Google, and RIM and discounting Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia long-term, it is clear that Nokia’s approach to the market is very different than the other vendors, which makes its game plan going forward, very unique, and focused long term.
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