Greetings from the New Product Development Strategies conference, held in Vienna this time. For the third consecutive year, I've had the luxury of discussing innovation, R&D, and new product creation strategies and methodologies with a diverse group of R&D and innovation professionals from food, tobacco, consumer electronics, consultancy, software, petrochemical and chemical companies. Getting a new perspective on things is often healthy. It's good to remember that the challenges and problems we face our own production environment are not unique. There are companies out there trying to fix exactly the same kind of problem that we are fixing in ours. In fact, there are companies specialized in offering the eye-opening experience of learning from what others in totally another industry have done.

One of these companies is Creax, who I met again this year. They have some thrilling examples how a tire company has benefited from an innovation done in a whipped-cream company, a metal company from a bakery, and how to pair foods based on their chemical scents. Creax is doing this by  utlising expired patents, among other means.

Cambridge Consultants were there, again with some exciting stories and hands-on demos of smart irons, teabag innovation, and a new mobile phone that works on an unlicensed spectrum as well as VOIP. The use of unlicensed 902-928 MHz ISM surprised me, it will be interesting to see how the call quality will be ensure for demanding US consumers. The radio technology is called xMax, and it claims 20 mile coverage with 10 Mbit/s data rate.

My own presentation was on Symbian Foundation, how Nokia came to the decision to go forward with this plan, and how we (as in the Symbian community) plan to make it a strategic piece in the palette of (re)gaining the best user experience and customer value one can offer. People came to me afterwards and were astonished how Nokia would do such a "donation" to the world. I'm not sure they believed me when I tried to re-assure that Nokia is gaining something, and not losing anything. Open source community is such a powerful force that by being totally open, we have the possibility to work with some of the most clever software people there are. 

The people from Fast Moving Consumer Goods, especially food industry were astonished, shaking their heads slightly to my suggestion to adopt open source philosophy to food production. It's an extremely competitive environment with innovation and productization lead times counted in weeks, not in months and certainly not in years. Sharing anything with their competitor is highly unusual.

All in all a refreshing and useful two days spent in Vienna. Perhaps the best souvenir was (in addition to new friends and innovation colleagues) the number of good NPD frameworks and tools that I can implement in my own work.