Networking and Collaboration ” Virtue, Not Necessity! In Sweden, leading businesspeople, academics , and politicians traditionally keep tight networks, since most of them have attended the country's top three schools ” the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm School of Economics, [11] and University of G teborg. [12] In addition to the educational networks in Sweden, business networks play a significant role. Before the boom of entrepreneurship in the late 1990s, top university graduates were generally recruited by large Swedish companies such as ABB and Ericsson. They provided exciting international career opportunities, enabling Swedish managers to build strong international business networks. Case Study: Ericsson ” A Fountain of Networking and Innovation At the center of the Swedish ICT personal networking phenomenon is the omnipresent Ericsson; try speaking to high-tech executives in Sweden about their past, and almost everyone has worked at Ericsson or Ericsson is their main customer or their technology partner. The opportunities to gather practical experience and build networks within Ericsson have been a strong source of leverage to entrepreneurs all over Sweden. These personal networks unfolded their potential when the climate for start-ups developed and entrepreneurship became fashionable in the second half of the 1990s. Large innovative companies such as Ericsson eventually proved a good basis for individuals to "jump ship" and start their own companies. Sweden's tight networks are generally complemented by a strong culture of teamwork, collaboration, and the sharing of information. Collaboration, even with competitors , is becoming increasingly important in nascent markets, where different technologies are necessary to develop innovative solutions. Collaboration is a paradigm of Swedish economic reality: "Collaborate in order to survive." An example for this traditional Swedish characteristic within a modern context, is the coexistence of Ericsson and Nokia in Kista. Jesper Ejdling Martell, director of Comintell, [13] a Stockholm-based company providing solutions and software for enterprise knowledge management, is a former employee of Ericsson, where he was manager of corporate business intelligence. He describes Ericsson and Nokia as having an almost brotherly relationship. Finland was once part of Sweden and the two countries have a history of military alliances. There have always been special sports competitions between the two countries , underlining a relationship of friendly competition. This historic tradition has materialized in the Ericsson/Nokia relationship. Supporting innovation in Sweden are flat organizational structures and employee empowerment levels considered to surpass those of other European countries as well as those of the United States. Hierarchy and elitism are seen very negatively in Sweden, the roots of which lie in the country's socialist history. Within this context, most of the information that is available to the management in Swedish companies is shared with the employees . Rather than top-down management directives for product development, it is usually the engineers who may have five or ten different projects going on at the same time, who drive product development. They compete internally for which project will eventually go to market. Unlike a typical American company, that will develop a project only if it recognizes a market demand, Ericsson engineers are free to "sit down and play" in the hope that something will emerge for which there will be a market. | Jesper Ejdling Ericsson and Nokia ” Collaborative competition in Kista The collaboration between the two companies started soon after Ericsson moved to Kista, when in 1984 its closest rival Nokia moved there as well in order to be close to the technological developments that were going on in the region. Since then, the proximity of the other has proven beneficial to both companies, an acute sense of competition constantly driving both of them to get better all the time. Regardless of their competitive relationship, Ericsson and Nokia often work in symbiosis, sharing information that would be considered highly confidential in other regions of the world. Neither of the two are out to make large amounts of money in their local markets, aiming rather to quickly develop solutions and standards and gain access to larger markets all over the globe that offer both of them vast opportunities at once. The Swedish concept for information sharing is, "if you feed information into the system, you become part of this system and you will probably get something out in return." Ericsson and Nokia have offices very close to each other and one can often see Ericsson and Nokia employees having lunch together discussing how to solve certain problems. There is a lot of personal interaction between the two companies, which is being actively encouraged by management. The relationship between the two companies can almost be described as a love/hate relationship: You share what you know and you hope the product gets developed. In the end it might not even matter who develops it, as long as it gets developed and new markets are created. Naturally, competitors can pick up internal information more easily in Sweden than in other countries. However at the pace of development in today's high-tech markets, it is not the information itself but what you do with it that matters. Things are happening so quickly that if Motorola got hold of Ericsson's strategy documents, they wouldn't be able to do much with them. They wouldn't have time to act on the information. | Foreign companies entering the Swedish market, attempting to lure individuals away from Swedish companies by offering higher pay, have had to deal with this Swedish cultural specificity. These companies were initially successful at attracting Swedish employees. However, they have had to watch many of these Swedes return to their original employers , accepting lower pay in return for the freedom of the Swedish culture, which is characterized marked by more of a sense of community than internal competition. The spirit of collaboration in a wider sense has become of central importance for companies such as Intel, increasingly building open architectures that build on cross-company and cross-industry collaboration in order to develop groundbreaking new solutions. Intel Sweden ” Collaborating to Establish Tomorrow's Standards When Intel reformulated its corporate focus from building microprocessors for PCs to becoming the preeminent building block supplier for the worldwide Internet economy several years ago, the company needed to move into previously unexplored fields of communications technology. Lars –stmarck, Nordic regional manager at Intel Sweden, describes that the company decided to invest in Kista to become competitive in emerging mobile computing markets. In addition to the wireless competency center in Stockholm, Intel Sweden operates a wireless communications center and full-scale customer testing center. Of its large sales force specifically selling components to Nokia and Ericsson, 50% is involved with communication, and 50% is involved with traditional microprocessing. Lars –stmarck An ideal environment to build co-opetition “based communications architectures At Intel, the new "green business" in communications was organized so that the "big mother" would not kill all of the little initiatives. At this time, a lot of companies were acquired in the communications field, especially in the Nordic regions. At the beginning of 2001, there were about 500 employees working on R&D in these acquired companies in the Nordic region, adding needed complementary capabilities to Intel's core competencies. The Intel wireless center in Kista works as a satellite of central R&D in the U.S., together with two other wireless competency centers in China and in Japan. China was selected due to the large market potential, while Japan was chosen in order to create new services. Their role is to drive the evolution of wireless computing, to watch, and to report on the latest happenings and players in the mobile ecosystem. Furthermore, these centers work on achieving higher acceptance of new architectures that are replacing today's microprocessor architectures. The combination of many manufacturers, service providers, and the high ICT penetration has attracted Intel to use the Swedish market as a test bed. The Swedish business community is quite used to working with remote management. It is very convenient , for example, to place an R&D center in Sweden and to connect it to other centers in the U.S. The spirit of leadership is, of course, local. Whereas in Finland the culture is very masculine, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are very consensus driven. Nonetheless, Sweden and the U.S. are quite close in the area of how people behave and manage. The clashes are much larger with Germany, where, for example, it is often not possible to send promotional material in English. The Swedish business culture has been an ideal environment for the development of open communications architectures that are conceived for collaborative development between companies and industries. Collaboration initiatives have for instance aimed at the establishment of industry standards, new services, and the understanding of customer usage patterns. Intel's mission in Kista is to develop standard building blocks on the basis of which other players can build new products. This strategy contrasts with the proprietary stand-alone solution stacks offered by other infrastructure providers. Intel does not believe in these proprietary solutions, since all members within the business ecosystem share an interest in the creation of open standards. Enabling two industries such as the communications and the computing industries to cooperate and eventually merge requires a sense for collaboration. Sweden is a good test ground for such an emerging business logic. Co-opetition is a characteristic inherent to the area because it is small, people know each other and it is easy to gather and work together on developments. An Intel success story within this context was when the Finnish company Sonera, which wanted to develop new services for its networks, utilized Intel's horizontal building block approach to construct its architecture. It was a beautiful way of getting operators and customers to endorse Intel's products at the same time. Sonera was the first operator in the world to do this. Its pioneering initiative influenced the entire ecosystem. Intel now wants to work increasingly with operators as well as service providers to develop open architectures. | Sweden's collaborative spirit is complemented by a far- ranging understanding of intellectual capital (IC) and the implications of IC for businesses. IC is considered by leading Swedish academics and business people to be at the basis of economic success and has prompted Swedish companies to adapt IC-oriented management tools centered around the intellectual capacities of their employees. |
