Nokia’s Palo Alto-based CTO

When I wrote about the director of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, I had no idea that he’d become the highest ranking US executive of the Finnish tech giant. But he became Nokia’s corporate CTO on Jan. 1. Obviously this is intended as a major culture shift for Nokia.

Monday at Mobile Monday I ran into Doug MacMillan of Nokia who told the crowd he’s hiring. Sure enough, across the Mobile Monday mailing list tonight came two job ads from MacMillan, now “Director, Technology Insight & Promotion” in the “Office of the CTO.” The first job was for making the CTO’s slides look whiffy (“Technical Visualist, Technology Insight & Promotion”). The more interesting one was for the “Manager, Technology Evangelism, Technology Insight & Promotion” whose job will include:

• Building Nokia "Internet company" perception & image in the Valley
• Development of external presence of CTO content & activities Web content authoring (research.nokia.com, opensource.com, nokia/research, nokia/openess, nokia/innovation)
• Internal and external evangelism of new interaction modes/web 3.0
• Market OCTO activities (Alpha-lab, Market trails, etc.) to Nokia

This sounds a lot like the BT’s Silicon Valley lab, which I taught last fall to my MBAs as part of a case on BT’s adoption of open innovation. Motorola is here too, while Qualcomm (like Microsoft before it) is building a new campus to colocate all its local acquisitions. Perhaps the Merc was right after all.

Maybe someday SBC will discover the valley. I’m not holding my breath. At least Arun Sarin (who went with the part of Pac Bell not bought by SBC) remembers what the valley looks like.