The NY Times today published a piece entitled “Nokia’s Bureaucracy Stifled Innovation, Ex-Managers Say“, revealing new details about individual cases where Nokia employees presented innovative ideas that were killed by managers unwilling to take risks or increase production costs. Nokia had a touchscreen phone in 2004, for example, and managers killed it for fear of it becoming a failure.
Another example I found particularly indicative of Nokia’s problem in idea conversion, related to Nokia’s infamous Symbian mobile operating system:
Juhani Risku, a manager who worked on user interface designs for Symbian from 2001 to 2009, said his team had offered 500 proposals to improve Symbian but could not get even one through.
“It was management by committee,” Mr. Risku said, comparing the company’s design approval processes to a “Soviet-style” bureaucracy. Ideas fell victim to fighting among managers with competing agendas, he said, or were rejected as too costly, risky or insignificant for a global market leader. Mr. Risku said he had left in frustration at its culture; he now designs environmentally sound buildings.
Mr. Risku also said that in 2002, he proposed a 3-D user interface for Symbian handsets, which at the time would have been unique to Nokia. He said his plan had been rejected because the software would have added $2.05 in production costs to each handset.