Market Openness, Trade Liberalisation and Innovation Capacity in the Finnish Telecom Equipment Industry

There is today a great interest in understanding how governments can promote innovation and the benefits it brings, as evidenced by the discussions at the 2007 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting. Against this background, the OECD Trade Committee decided to undertake a "Trade and Innovation Project", to gain a better understanding of how trade and investment patterns and policies affect innovation capacity, and interact with other key policies influencing innovation performance. This paper is one of the five case studies conducted in the framework of this project. It examines how recent trade and investment patterns (including "trade in tasks" resulting from supply chain fragmentation) and Finnish and global policies promoting market openness and free trade have affected the innovation process in Finland’s (mobile) telecom equipment industry. The study illustrates how regulatory, trade and investment policy choices have helped -- alongside other key policies-- provide the right framework conditions for innovation in this country of 5.2 million people. In addition, it examines how the private sector, and more particularly Nokia, has taken advantage of those conditions to enhance its innovation capacity. This study does not constitute an in-depth evaluation of the effectiveness of Finnish public policies nor of Nokia’s business strategy. Rather, it provides an illustration of how certain public policy choices and business strategies can contribute to a country’s innovation performance.