Nokia is one of the most familiar names worldwide, but not everyone is conversant with the fact that the company started out in 1865 with a mill producing paper—the original communications technology—and that it took a merger with a cable company and a rubber firm to set the new Nokia Corp. on the path to electronics in the 1960s. This article offers a brief history going back to the 19th century, explains key developments of the 20th century before focusing on how the Nokia Research Center is taking technology forward in the 21st century.
Pulp Fact
Having built a wood pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski rapids, in southern Finland in 1865, Fredrik Idestam built a second mill by the Nokianvirta River—the place that gave the company its name when it became Nokia Ab in 1871. Electricity generation was added to its business activities in 1902.
Nokia Ab, Finnish Cable Works and Finnish Rubber Works, which had been jointly owned since 1922, officially merged in 1967 to form the Nokia Corp. Finnish Cable Works originally branched out into electronics in the 1960s, making its first electronic device in-house in 1962: a pulse analyzer designed for use in nuclear power plants. The company’s involvement with telecommunications systems also began in the ‘60s, and in 1963 it started to develop radio telephones for the army and emergency services.
Nokia would later make: TVs (by 1987 the company was the third largest TV manufacturer in Europe), computers (the MikroMikko became the best known computer brand in Finland), radio telephones, data transfer equipment, radio links and analyzers, and digital telephone exchanges.
Nokia ceased consumer electronics manufacture in the 1990s, with the telecommunications expertise that it had developed from the 1960s onwards becoming its core activity.
Nokia Research Center
The corporation views R&D as a key tool to keeping the company at the forefront of technology. To facilitate vital innovation, the company founded the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in 1986 from the Nokia Electronics R&D unit.
NRC is chartered with exploring new frontiers for mobility, solving scientific challenges to transform the converging Internet and communications industries. Teams are strategically located worldwide to collaborate with leading universities and research institutes in the mode of Open Innovation—deep research collaborations with world-leading academia, industry collaborators and independent developers—sharing resources, leveraging ideas and tapping into the prevalent expertise. Some of the largest collaboration projects take place with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA, Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, USA, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Current research is focused on the areas of high performance mobile platforms, cognitive radio, rich context modeling and new user interface.
High Performance Mobile Platforms
The focus is on crafting a comprehensive superior mobile platform to radically improve the performance to power ratio, empower new sensing capabilities and extend the platform and architecture beyond a single device. Research is centered in Finland, complemented by teams in the US and UK, and is focused on: ubiquitous architectures (extending the single device), energy efficient computing architectures, computational structures, nano-based enablers for sensing and computing, platform security and holistic system-level power management.
Cognitive Radio
In connectivity, the world is moving towards a fundamentally disruptive new era where intelligent devices leverage awareness of environmental circumstances and user needs to determine how to communicate on the fly via dynamic spectrum use for improved capacity. Research is centered in Helsinki, Finland, including at the Lablet at Otaniemi and is focused on: methods for flexible spectrum use, novel ways of sensing the radio environment and location using radio waves, distributed networks and low power flexible implementation of radio front-ends and protocols.
Rich Context Modeling
Rich context is characterized by the use of a wide range of sensor information to aggregate data into a coherent model of a user’s surroundings, including things like their location, motion, weather, connectivity options and proximity to others. This data and its analysis form the backbone for a new class of services in areas like weather, traffic, wellness, or entertainment. Research, spread evenly in the United States, Europe and China, is focused on: service architectures and enabling technologies such as data management and mining, pervasive sensing and context data economics.
New User Interface
Future user interfaces will need to integrate the personalization and adaptive aspects of the device with data-sharing enabled by the Internet and back-end infrastructure. In addition, they will incorporate a user’s physical attributes (movements, activities and environment) and personal needs (unique input methodologies) to seamlessly blend with their lives. Research, located in Europe and in the United States, with teams in China, India and Africa providing regional and cultural variation, is focused on: user experience that meets cultural preferences, mixed reality technologies in conjunction with multi-modal interaction and immersive communications and media representation.
NRC Global Locations
Ten locations worldwide enable NRC to engage with the foremost minds and partners in the mobile field to conduct leading-edge research. By bridging this wide variety of cultures, environments and skill-sets across these diverse geographies, NRC empowers Nokia to develop products and services that meet the needs of its customers.
Collaborating with the Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Finland, NRC Tampere is chartered with exploring the areas of sensing and context, media representation, social media, user experience, mixed reality solutions and 3D platforms.
NRC Helsinki is just a few minutes from Nokia worldwide headquarters in Espoo, Finland. Working in conjunction with the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), which is also the location of the Nokia Research Lablet at Otaniemi, NRC Helsinki projects are pushing forward the fields of user experience, mobile security, power management and computing architectures, as well as cognitive radio. The Otaniemi Lablet works in an open mode with various laboratories of TKK. This means establishing joint research programs and daily interaction between Nokia and university researchers who share the same facilities.
NRC Cambridge USA is a cross-disciplinary research organization working closely with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The laboratory consists of approximately 20 Nokia researchers, investigating all aspects of mobile phones, from computer and network architecture to user interfaces and its charter is to bring new ideas into Nokia products ranging from rich content-based services to user interfaces.
NRC Palo Alto, CA, USA, is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Collaborating with both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, the NRC’s work consists of mobile Internet services systems, mobile business solutions, context-specific content, visual computing and ubiquitous imaging and other user experience enhancing technologies.
NRC Hollywood in Los Angeles, CA, USA, is positioned centrally in the media industry. It works with members of the media and entertainment industry, including new technology companies and creative talent, together with leading universities in the region, including the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
The NRC Cambridge UK laboratory is located on the campus of the University of Cambridge. Collaborating extensively with the university, the laboratory develops nanotechnologies for mobile communication and ambient intelligence.
NRC Lausanne, Switzerland, is one of Nokia’s newest research facilities and is chartered with collaborating with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and ETH Zürich to explore the field of pervasive sensing and computing.
NRC India team focuses on emerging market services for both urban and rural India. Collaborating with the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge USA, its aim is to explore user-centric technologies to generate new business opportunities for Nokia in India and other emerging markets.
Beijing is seen as an ideal location for NRC to take advantage of China’s fast growing economy and the world’s largest mobile market. NRC Beijing works with Tsinghua University to explore the key research topics of context computing architectures, context data modeling and management, and mobile social networks.
NRC Africa works with various groups to solve the unique African language, cultural, educational and infrastructure challenges that can all be improved through mobile technologies.
Those are the facts. For the inside story, read Petteri Alinikula’s Executive Interview online.
