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?

The internet can provide incredible tools for transparency; easy access to large volumes of information, wide distribution to anybody with an internet connection or a library card, and indexing mechanisms to make search easier. In the case of government, it would be trivial to provide access to campaign donations, and then cross reference the voting patterns of any elected government representative. Lessig argues that the massive amount of information needs more context, and with the decline of the newspaper industry (and therefore the decline in investigative journalism), there are fewer outlets to provide it.

In the healthcare sector, it wouldn’t be too difficult to be able to discover information about your doctor to find out which drug companies are paying her airfare to conferences, or a stipend to be a reviewer of potential new drug research (if such information had mandatory reporting requirements).

Where a member of Congress acts in a way inconsistent with his principles or his constituents, but consistent with a significant contribution, that act at least raises a question about the integrity of the decision. But beyond a question, the data says little else.

This is the heart of Lessig’s argument. There is a huge difference between information and insight.

The answer lies not in less transparency but in more effective public metafilters. In a socially calibrated business, effort is made to filter the vast amounts of information available. You must purposefully turn data into actionable information. There is certainly a public corollary.

Public metafilters could be non-profit organizations or “think tanks” meant to distill the mountains of data into meaning. They could be investigative journalists, although the fact that their paychecks come from large corporations could taint their findings. Public metafilters could be bloggers, and others with a passion for the subject matter.

One other big challenge for public metafilters is the scarcity of attention in today’s attention economy. Some issues are incredibly complex, and can’t be boiled down into a sound bite, 140 characters, or even a 500 word blog post. The more complex the issue and the analysis, the smaller the audience for it becomes.

While the decline in the total number of investigative journalists in the newspaper business may cause the ship to tilt to the port side, we have to hope that market forces will create more public metafilters to right the ship, rather than a decrease in transparency.

We welcome your comments on this issue. When is transparency appropriate in your organization?