HELSINKI: Mobile applications, multimedia terminals, and wireless access would be the strategic focus areas for Nokia. This was announced by Tero Ojanpera, head of the Nokia Research Center, a 1200 member team at Nokia, which identifies and drives the some of the top of the line and futuristic research and development work.
Some of the current areas that Nokia is involved in these days include gesture inputs, robotics, next generation display terminals, sensor technologies, speech recognition, Optical Character recognition, Wi-Fi and power consumption.
Without divulging any further details on the work, Ojanpera said that some of this work was being done in collaboration with external partners. The Nokia Research Center is a separate identity from the R&D work, which is taken by the various business units at Nokia with the help of some 20,000 people.
According to Ojanpera, "The role of this R&D center is to challenge the various business groups at Nokia in a positive spirit". About 60 percent funding for this center comes from the business units themselves, 30 percent from the corporate office, and the remaining 10 percent from the public.
Research and development will assume increasing significance as the telecom market has revived, and the new markets are emerging in developing economies, about which players like Nokia have to learn a lot.
Besides product development, Nokia, the brand leader is, also aggressively positioning itself as a price leader. A lot of research work is directed towards adding new features yet keeping costs under control.
With more focus on product enhancement and development, a lot of which, will revolve around software, India is likely to be one of the beneficiaries. According to Jorma Ollila, chairman and CEO of Nokia, not only will India be among the top 3 fastest growing mobile phone markets in the world, but more and more product development work will be downloaded to India.
CyberMedia News
Ibrahim Ahmad was hosted in Helsinki by Nokia