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On Tuesday I met with her royal highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned of Qatar, who was visiting Finland with a team of Qatari research, development and innovation leaders.
Although Qatar is prospering very well due to their natural gas reserves, they’re putting a lot of resources into ensuring that the country is developed in a holistic and diversified way.
In the meeting I sat next to Anne Stenros, design director of Kone, the renowned maker of quality elevators. People Flow, as they call it. Already 20 years ago, Kone started to equip their elevators with phone lines and modems in order to collect fault, performance and general usage information. Today this system is called Konexion and as far as I can tell, it is one of their critical success factors against competition. 20 years – that means Big Data, all at disposal now.
After Nokia’s Erkki Ormala’s presentation I pointed out that in order to enable this data collection, Kone needed Nokia’s fledgling 1200bit/s modems. Although not a huge business area for Nokia at the time, the enablement impact for Kone was profound.
My message to Qatar is that it is important not only to develop certain technologies, but also continuously scout for convergence possibilities with other disciplines.
Next time when I’m in Doha I aim to meet with Qatargas – having never seen an advanced gas field, I’m looking forward to see what we could do together.
//Pasi
