Taking the Measure

Open innovation involving collaboration among companies, universities, and organizations will become increasingly important in the wireless marketplace, said Petteri Alinikula, vice president of core technology research at Nokia, in his Monday evening keynote address to attendees of this week's International Microwave Symposium.

The success of open-source software and Internet services should convince you that open innovation is valuable in wireless, he told the audience.

Device are evolving, Alinikula said, with power consumption down and computing power up, and device size has decreased two orders of magnitude in a 20-year period. Mobile phones are no longer only tools for businessmen. Development has been accelerating, giving us multipurpose small devices that include GPS capability, cameras integrated storage.

Business landscape in transition, he said, and we are in the “morning of a new paradigm of connectivity and usability,” where what matters to consumers are ways “do what matters to them and be connected to the people that mater to them.”

New paradigm includes global operability. Today, he said, the home domain, the car domain, and the mobile domain are separate; what’s needed is interoperability across those domains.

As we enter this new morning, Alinikula said, “We don’t know what biggest challenges are, and open innovation best way to address unknown challenges.”

Alinikula touched on what some of the challenges might be.
“Moore’s Law is still well and will continue to driven by innovations in manufacturing,” he said, but noted that mobile devices must operate at extremely low power levels. “You can fight the laws of physics, but the laws of physics always win,” he added.

In addition, data traffic and complexity are growing, he said, driven by handhelds and laptops. Spectrum regulation efforts are trying to assist growth in traffic by allowing new bands—with 20 different bands now being considered for mobile uses, he noted.

Cognitive radio will permit secondary use of spectrum, he said, and TV white space is being considered for considered for secondary use by mobile equipment. The fact that it becomes unnecessary to completely empty spectrum to open it for mobile use will significantly accelerate the initiation of new wireless technology, he added.

On the business side, he said, very few companies can meet the coming challenges alone and survive, he noted, adding that many will need to consolidate or go out of business. He advised open innovation—the classic definition of which is, he said, “purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for eternal use of innovation.”

An accelerating technology life-cycle will drive innovation, he said, adding that challenges include IP creation and sharing, with a cultural change needed to move organizations toward co-creativity.

One effort Nokia is taking, he said, is to establish a “lablet” on the Otaniemi campus of Helsinki University of Technology as part of an effort to form strategic collaborations with world-leading institutions.

Open innovation, he said, involves not only working with universities; it also involves working with open-source developers, taking advantage of customer-driven innovation, and establishing cooperative efforts between companies.

He said he sees opportunities on several application areas: location sensing capabilities, for example, which will tell you the direction and distance to another phone (using a special antenna structure and special algorithms) or to your lost keys or golf ball. Another area, he said, is high accuracy indoor positioning (where GPS is not available) with ceiling-based antenna arrays (in shopping malls, for example).
 
Cognitive radio, he said, is a hot topic but will require spectrum sensing algorithms and hardware network-control solutions to manage wireless frequency-agile heterogeneous environments to get more capacity using spectrum in a more efficient and flexible way. In addition, he said, software-defined radios will provide cost savings and improvements in time to market. He said he also sees opportunities in sports and fitness (wireless sensors in your tennis racket that teach you to play better tennis), healthcare, home entertainment, and automotive applications.

He concluded by saying that building a culture of co-creativity in the heart of open innovation, noting that the development of ecosystems requires cross-layer innovation within open multi-domain consortiums.