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74 Pekka Himanen and Manuel CastellsThe culture of innovationThe third key factor in the innovation field is the culture of innovation. A highlevel of knowledge turns into new innovations only if people are motivated touse their creativity. In Finland, a positive culture of innovation has encouragedpeople like Jorma Nieminen, the pioneer of the mobile phone at Nokia, orLinus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, to innovate bothin business and in the university.Again, the state, business, and people all contribute to the culture of innovation.On the government’s part, one of the most critical developments forthe Finnish breakthrough in mobile telecommunications was the push for anopen Nordic mobile standard and market. At the turn of the 1960s, thisresulted in cooperation between the Nordic national postal and telecommunicationcompanies to create the NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone) network.This became the world’s first transnational automatic mobile communicationnetwork and, in fact, was the world’s biggest market in the number of usersat the beginning of the 1980s (Pulkkinen, 1997). More importantly, it was anetwork based on an open standard that was open to competition beforeothers. From the beginning, it was open for all equipment manufacturers tocompete, and Nokia had to take on such big challengers as Ericsson,Motorola, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, NET, and Siemens both in mobile networkand phone technology. In the same way, when Finland liberalized mobilephone service provision in 1990, the Finnish company Radiolinja (part ofElisa Communications) became the world’s first commercial GSM operator,and mobile tele-operators have had to compete based on their services.When the GSM mobile revolution began on a global scale, Nokia alreadyhad years of experience in transnational open competition and was especiallywell positioned to take the world leadership.Fundamentally, the state has facilitated the innovation of highly educatedpeople in the universities and business. In companies, innovativeness isbased on a work and management culture of innovation. This is well illustratedby the case of Nokia. In the 1960s, a few innovators started to believethat in the future communications might be wireless, and they persisted inthis vision so strongly that Nokia set up a special laboratory to develop thistechnology. The laboratory was full of young engineers who were enthusiasticabout the new idea and joined forces to make it happen. The laboratoryhad close links with the research taking place at Helsinki University ofTechnology, so like-minded professors and students kept joining the lab.There were also other places that gave their engineers the freedom andsecurity to be creative, which ultimately became merged with the Nokia lab.One of these places was another big Finnish company called Salora, whichinvested in the development of mobile phones at the same time. In fact, itsdevelopment, led by the pioneer innovator Jorma Nieminen, was in some