Abstract
When Stephen Elop joined Nokia as President and CEO in September 2010, he faced a daunting turnaround challenge. Nokia’s mobile device market share, which had peaked in 2007 at around 40 % worldwide, had fallen to under 30 %. The decline coincided with the launch of Apple’s wildly popular iPhone line and Google’s release of its open and free Android mobile operating system. This new competition triggered a tectonic shift in consumer demand, wireless carrier and app developer interest away from Nokia’s classic hardware-centric phone designs to Internet-connected smartphones with an abundance of applications. But that long-term shift and Nokia’s inability to keep pace are only obvious in retrospect. Elop joined Nokia amid expressions of optimism from the company’s directors that “The core strategy is solid and Nokia will continue to power through what is a substantial transformation (from a hardware company to a software company). Elop will help to accelerate that” (Nokia 2010).
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Cronin, M.J. (2014). Nokia Drops the Torch. In: Top Down Innovation. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03901-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03901-5_4
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