How Nokia changed the world

Text: Richard Fisher

In the 1990s and early 2000s, millions of people around the world bought their first mobile phone. These devices were not smart. They didn’t have app stores or social media. But for the first time, they allowed us to speak on the move, send rudimentary texts, and play an infuriatingly addictive game called Snake. Their impact on the way we lived would be transformative.

For many people, that first phone was a Nokia. At the time, the Finnish company was a major player in the global handset market, making billion-dollar revenues, innovating in design, and even enjoying Hollywood cameos. In 1999, the "banana phone” that Keanu Reeves flipped open in The Matrix was a Nokia. Through modern eyes, the devices now seem basic – with text messages that read "gr8 2 cu" on pixelated screens – but for many people of a certain age, Nokia phones evoke pure nostalgia.

To find answers, researchers at Aalto University have created the Nokia Design Archive. Exploring the contents of the archive offers valuable insights into the culture in which its designers and engineers operated.  But alongside these insights, we can also ask the people who were there: what's their perspective on why Nokia phones became so ubiquitous, and what was it like inside the firm in its heyday? 

Rubber and rolls

Nokia's history goes back more than 150 years and for most of that time, the company was not known for its telephony innovations. In the mid-20th century, the rubber division of Nokia was making waterproof galoshes, boots and tyres, while the forestry wing manufactured toilet paper.

When Mikko Kosonen – former chair of the Aalto University board and former president of Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra – accepted a job there in the 1980s, his classmates teased him for joining such an uninspiring conglomerate. "It was a laughable thing for business students. Nobody wanted to go to Nokia because it was a boring company. They all wanted to go to other places those days."

Gradually, though, that reputation began to change, as Nokia repositioned itself as a world leader in telecoms. How did it do it?

"Finland was a very savvy and very advanced telecom market," explains Kosonen, who would eventually become Nokia's head of strategy and chief information officer. "Local circumstances and conditions have to be favourable for something new to grow." 

However, the company's leadership also saw something about human behaviour that few at the time did: that phones would become a desirable object; a product that would appeal to teenagers and their grandparents alike. 

So, in little over a decade, the "boring conglomerate" that Kosonen joined in the 1980s – making toilet roll and rubber cables – had positioned itself to design objects that would appear in Hollywood movies, celebrity paparazzi photos, and the hands of catwalk models. 

Nokia's ability to pivot its business is a trait that current company leaders might learn from, says Kosonen. After leaving Nokia, he studied the renewal strategies of global companies. Nokia was one of several case studies that he and his collaborator Yves Doz analysed in a book ‘Fast Strategy'. They argued that a successful board has "strategic agility": a sensitivity to new opportunities, an open-minded commitment to change, and the resource fluidity to move fast. 

At the turn of the century, Nokia's products were making the company billions, and Nokia alone accounted for 4% of Finland's GDP. Its spirit of creativity and optimism would shape the nation’s self-identity for many years, giving Finns self-belief as its success helped pull Finland from a bitter recession in the 90s. 

'Disneyland for designers'

One young designer who was drawn by the "Nokia Way" was Tej Chauhan, who now runs his own design firm. After joining the UK office in 2000, he would go on to create various models, including the "mango" and "lipstick" phones. Compared with today's ubiquitous black-rectangle smartphones, these models were highly unusual – and capture the creativity and freedom of Nokia's company culture at the time. 

One day, a member of Nokia's management team came over to Chauhan and asked him: "Do you want to design something crazy?" The mango phone was the result, marketed as a "souvenir from the future".

"It was like Disneyland for designers," Chauhan recalls. "I was surrounded by lots of brilliant people. It felt like being part of a family."

"There was a very proactive creative spirit," he adds. "If you wanted to go and research, say, a phone made out of banana skins, there's a good chance that you might get some budget to go and do that, so long as you could tie it back to a business goal." 

Above all, the archive gives us a precious opportunity to look back at a pivotal point in history, from another pivotal point in history.

If we had known back then where technology would take us, would Nokia people have made the same decisions? And are today’s big tech innovators smart enough to learn from the past as they make choices that shape our future? 

As ever, knowledge is power. Like Neo in the Matrix, perhaps the lessons from a past tech giant can help us dodge some future bullets.

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Nokia Design Archive has been made possible by donations from Microsoft Mobile Oy and designers and by funding from The Research Council of Finland and the Kaute Foundation.