Nokia is a fascinating company. They are the single most important company in the nation of Finland. They employ 129,000 people. They control 40.3% of the global cellular phone market – and yet we only really hear Nokia’s name in relation to how badly the iPhone and Android are eating their lunch.

Source: Nokia.com

With that background, it was interesting reading this recent article in the New York times regarding the countless opportunities that Nokia has squandered to lead the smartphone market. A few examples culled from the article include:

• Years before the iPhone, Nokia tested touch screen phone technology, but failed to embrace the concept until long after the iPhone launched
• Nokia employees invented a Nokia App store in 2004 but never deployed it
• 500 operating system upgrades were suggested by Nokia research teams from 2001 to 2009 but none were adopted

The main lesson to be gleaned from these examples? The future has already been invented at Nokia. They just don’t know what the future is or how to commercialize it.

On a personal level this is frustrating because I really love Nokia phones. My first phone was a Nokia and it was an awesomely reliably and beloved device. My favorite phone of all time was a Nokia N95 that survived incredible abuse (most notably a drop into the Mekong River during a vacation to Laos) to serve me well for years.

On a professional level this is frustrating because what the New York Times makes abundantly clear is that things didn’t have to be this way. If we just recast Nokia’s issues in Social Business Design terms, and examine certain archetypes, it’s easy to see why.

What Nokia has is not an innovation problem, but a Dynamic Signal problem. This is common at large corporations. Teams generate ideas and features of varying quality. Some are terrible. Some are revolutionary. The issue is that there are so many signals that no one can possibly evaluate the ideas fairly. The result is conservative decision making based on accounting instead of the true merits of an idea. Companies can overcome these problems by creating structure around the signals and then using filtering systems to parse the raw ideas floating around.

My suggestion is to turn Nokia’s size into an asset by developing a stronger ecosystem. In Nokia’s case, the answer may lie in the collective wisdom of their 129,000 employees, their substantial supply chain, and the huge worldwide customer base. A good place to start might be enabling the ecosystem to populate a crowdsourcing platform with idea submissions from across the company, letting the whole organization act as a metafilter – filtering the concepts by priority, and aligning those ideas with a strategy.

Of course, no amount of crowdsourcing can supplant the power of strong leadership and a vision of the future. But what this kind of filtering can do is reduce thousands of options to a few dozen. From there it becomes possible to actually assess and discard ideas instead of letting them die before they even see the light of day.

What do you think? What other social solutions could we bring to bear on Nokia’s Dynamic Signal and Metafilter problems?