Former Nokia Engineers Fueling Finnish Startups

Posted by Unknown on Thursday August 4, 2011 @02:15AM from the funeral-pyre dept.

pbahra writes with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. From the article: "A few weeks ago Microsoft's European chairman told TechEurope that the average amount of venture capital per head across Europe was just $7. ... Finnish blog ArcticStartup has extrapolated figures showing the total average VC investment per capita for the country was $46 in 2010... The question of why this country on the edge of the Arctic Circle should have such active entrepreneurs came up again in a conversation with Wilhelm Taht, the marketing director of Flowd... 'With Nokia changing gear there is a lot of technical know-how all of a sudden which wasn't available even two years ago,' said Mr.Taht, diplomatically, about the savage job cuts at the struggling mobile phone giant. 'There's a culture of technically savvy engineers. Finns are not necessarily very talkative people, but when it comes to what they know about computers and programming it's pretty staggering.'"

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As a former Nokia/Symbian engineer... by bre_dnd · 2011-08-04 02:28 · Score: 4, Insightful

... this confirms my bitter suspicions that it wasn't the engineers running Nokia against the iceberg, but the captains.
Innovation could have happened, if only they didn't try to "manage" all the fun out of the job. Oh well.