Nokia goes Open Source

On February 23^rd of this year Nokia announced that Symbian had become Open Source. Google’s Open Source Android mobile phones and the smart phone by Apple (iPhone) have dominated the market with their innovation, beauty and excellence for the last 2 years.

What about Nokia?

Commercial VS Open Source

The almighty question:
Go Open Source or buy Commercial software?


Of course, the answer is much more complicated than that. We will attempt in this post to define some of the factors that are playing a crucial role to this decision. However, we will mention only a few; we expect to get the rest from you as food for thought!


There are a few dimensions to be defined concerning software:
1. Security
2. Coding quality (bugs)
3. New Features/Upgrade circle
4. Support
5. Administration


The main focus of this post will be the area of telephony soft switches / call centers. 

What is Innovation?

Innovation can be simply defined as "invention plus commercialization" (Christopher Freeman), or as "a new way of doing things that is commercialized" (Michael Porter).


The term "innovation" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "invention", although the concepts are readily distinguished. In business, according to Wikipedia, "innovation can be easily distinguished from invention. Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas. Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash."


Innovation begins with creativity, the generation of new and useful ideas. Well-known, practical creativity techniques include brainstorming, de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, and TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).


The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that there are essentially four types of innovation: product innovation; process innovation; marketing innovation and organisational innovation. Melissa Schilling, a prominent academic in Innovation Management, in her book Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, identifies four dimensions widely used to distinguish types of innovation: product versus process innovation, radical versus incremental innovation, competence-enhancing versus competence-destroying, and architectural versus component innovation.


We are Alex, Willings and Andreas, and currently study towards a Master of Science degree in the Management of Business, Innovation and Technology at Athens Information Technology. We have diverse experience in Research and Development, Telecom and Networking, Education, Business and Finance, Open-source development, and Patent Law. As part of a project for a very interesting course on E-business taught by Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou and Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou, we have decided to create this blog that will discuss in detail issues related to a relative new and hyped about innovation discipline, namely "Open Innovation" (OI). We plan to provide a general overview of OI, summarize leading-edge research on OI, define opportunities and challenges, and describe how OI is used in practice. We also plan to address two disciplines that are very much related to OI and are of interest to us: open source and intellectual proprietary rights.


We truly hope that you will enjoy our blog! Ideas and comments are always welcome.


The Open Innovation Team!
(You can also find us on Twitter)