White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENand China. Thus the Swedish industry had responded with two action lines: first a leadfirmlike Sony Ericsson would make decreasing amounts of hardware and instead placeits focus upon managing global services, such as selling network services to servicesuppliers such as, in Scandinavia, Telenord and Telia, to whom they also sell the extraservice of managing the network, Telia simply managing billing and cash flow. AccordinglyTelia had been cutting employment since the mid-2000s and had not filed anypatents for two to three years. It was also felt that ST Ericsson, the telephony infrastructurearm of the Ericsson Group would probably not in the future survive as a standalonecompany. The medium-term key competition for Sony Ericsson is seen in MobileHeights to be Chinese firm Huawei, which recently located an office in Lund, MobileHeights‟ home base, for the development of basic components for mobile phones. Huaweiworks with everything from base stations to mobile Internet modems and its owntelephone handsets. This augments their earlier offices at Kista Science Park in Stockholmand Gothenburg, employing 250 engineers. Some Chinese Internet portals like AliBaba and Ten Cents are assessed by Mobile Heights as larger than Google. The otherkeen competitor for the Ericsson Group as a leading specialist in mobile telephonyinfrastructure platforms is San Diego-based Qualcomm. Their list of customers includesSony Ericsson, which uses the company's platforms for their Android smartphones. TheUS firm also located an office in Lund in 2010, seen as partly an effect of increaseddemand and cutbacks in the telecom sector in Lund that have made hundreds of qualifiedengineers available. The second resilience strategy being adopted in the industry,very rapidly in Sweden, was the adoption of „open innovation‟ whereby IPR is madeavailable to SMEs and start-up businesses for exploitation (Chesbrough, 2003). Anearly adopter of „open innovation‟, the Dutch firm Philips had exhausted its unused IPRby outsourcing it to spin-out entrepreneurs as a result of which it had experienced yetanother round of employment downsizing. Sony Ericsson is now active in a major wayin „open innovation‟ relationships with innovative start-ups. Ericsson has been a classic„closed innovation‟ firm but they have ample resources to buy from external suppliersand are actively seeking to contract to or acquire them. That there are quality entrepreneurialfirms in the region is testified to by RIM (BlackBerry) acquiring user-interfacemaker The Astonishing Tribe (TAT). Also Polar Rose, a Malmö startup which built afacial recognition programme that linked into Facebook photos, was bought by Applefor $29 million, both in late 2010. Other open innovation connections involve MobileHeights start-ups contracting to AstraZeneca in the Life Sciences cluster for remotediagnostics telephony with discussions proceeding on biosensors. From the cluster perspectivea key focus is on the MH Business Centre where start-ups are nurtured withenterprise support, contracts and IPR from larger firms. Lateral linkages are also inposition with the Media Evolution (Nordic Game) and Open Health Alliance clustersnearby and the FPX (Geographical Information Systems) cluster at Gaevle and the BalticSea Region cluster partnership.46