I read the book about the impossible success

Today we can read in the magazines and newspapers that Nokia's headquarters will be microsofted. I feel sad as many Finns feel even if they say that Nokia will head for new futures. Nokia was a part of our national pride and even if there were many failures and the pride even got in the way of being sensitive to new innovations, Nokia was important for us and maybe still will be.

I just finished reading Jorma Ollila's story about the impossible success and I did it as a person who  lived in a Nokia family for 23 years (1987-2010). I must say, that for me the book was a therapeutic journey that materialized what happened in my home during a period of time where the important thing at Nokia was to accomplish, execute and show results, something Jorma Ollila was really demanding of himself and the employees. I even remember how I felt when I found a book on our bedroom table that talked about execution (The discipline of getting things done). The book seemed hostile to me with a language like that, but at the same time I understood the point. Anyway all the organizational changes were explained in the book, how people were chosen for different positions, who was rewarded and how the language of Nokia became a language of those working there, leaving out others. It was not easy to understand all the achronyms and words as infrastructure, backbone services, platforms, escalating transitions etc. The Nokia language was for a closed community.

In the year 2010 in the spring time I had a meeting with an application guru at Nokia and as I was waiting for my colleagues to come I had time to look at those who came to work. I wonder if you could already see that the Nokia stereotype had taken over and bureacracy ruled? I saw people walk through a tube or transparent corridor from the parking space at the same pace, in clothes of same nuances (black and beige), same hairdo. There was nothing of that entrepreneurial spirit that built up the incredible growth in the nineties. Well, if you can see entrepreneurial spirit of the way people behave and are dressed of course...

Anyway, Nokia mobile phones are gone but they gave birth to several good innovations and I hope that these innovations will create an atmosphere that will give birth to nice innovations for our ageing society. And at the same time I hope that we can see more women as innovators as well as leaders. In the Nokia dream team there were too few. Maybe that is the reason why the innovativeness and spirit of doing things died out?

Marie-C.

Ps. I really would like to thank J Ollila for his book :-)

Research article: Female entrepreneurs and media

I will shortly comment on an article written by Doris Eikhof, Juliette Summers and Sara Carter in 2013. The article can be found here:  "Women doing their own thing".

When we are talking about startups and high-growth entrepreneurship we may stereotypically see a certain gender before us. With the help of the article of Eikhof & al I try to find out whether there are some typical ways of constructing a typical female entrepreneurial identity. One important factor influencing identity construction is media as a part of our culture. This is clearly addressed in the article. As you have maybe read earlier is how Kilbourne (2004:242) puts it: "Advertising performs much the same function in industrial society as myth performed in ancient and primitive societies: It is both the creator and perpetuator of the dominant attitudes, values, and ideology of culture, as well as the social norms and myths by which most people live”. I want to underline this here as advertising does play an important role in how female entrepreneurs are empowered or disempowered.

Eikhof and Summers ( 2013) have done a study where they used the UK-based women's magazine named eve to study female entrepreneur representations. One reason for using this magazine as a data source was that it was presenting something they called "women doing their own thing" every month. This theme was about women who decided to start their own business instead of continuing a corporate career. In the article the emphasis is on female media representations  but Eikhof and Summers (2013:549) also have an important contribution in their way of emphasizing entrepreneurial activity as work. This is something that I as a newcomer in this research discourse may not even understand at first. I even had to ask myself: Is their something that you do as an entrepreneur that normally isn't considered as work? Well, some answers are found in the article.

One important finding was that female entrepreneurship was represented with stories underlining typical female activity and in a typically female context (p.559). The combination of parenthood and work was an important representation in connection with female entrepreneurship. What consequences do these representations have if we want to inspire women to becoming highgrowth entrepreneurs?

Research article: Gender and entrepreneurship

I will shortly comment on an article written by Susan Marlow and Maura McAdam in 2011: Gender and entrepreneurship. Comments will be written in a non-academic way.

The main theme is about myths about female entrepreneurs and why they are seen as under-performers. Already the word under-performing makes you read more. As a matter of fact I have never thought about that. Are women entrepreneurs under-performing? Okay I have to read a little bit further in the article. Well, there are more male entrepreneurs than female ones and female entrepreneurs tend to work in sectors of limited growth (p 115). Female entrepreneurs also tend to work part time and base their businesses in their homes. Quoting the authors: "So, we know that many female-owned firms are marginal and vulnerable; few are innovative entrepreneurial enterprises with the potential to create new wealth or act as net employment generators." (p.116) But the authors argue that this under-performing is not typical for female entrepreneurs but it is a reflection of small firms as such. The horrible thing is that female entrepreneurs are labeled. What could be done to avoid this stereotyping process? Should we avoid using gender as an explaining variable? One important thing according to Marlow & McAdam is  to stop focusing on "female lack" when doing research on female entrepreneurs. I totally agree. Maybe we should be interested in different ways of being an entrepreneur instead and see how that contributes to society? And when I talk about contribution, it's not only about economic value but also the value of empowerment. Feeling comfortable with your small company may contribute more to the well-being in our society.

Some thoughts about entrepreneurship

I work with entrepreneurship education because it is urgently needed. Our aging society needs entrepreneurs or at least people with an entrepreneurial mindset. I have not been engaged for too long with this subject as I looked at the aging society from another angle, namely the lack of marketing skills targeting elderly consumers. Fortunately I can use the methodological skills I developed researching "elderly consumer talk" also in the way we are talking about entrepreneurship. I haven't got so far yet but there are some themes that I think that are already stronger than others. Some themes express how wonderful it is to be an entrepreneur (through success stories), some themes want to tell why it is so difficult (and it sure is in Finland) and some themes talk about entrepreneurship as an identity. Sometimes it is all about finances and I would really like to know if today's success stories are made by people who already have stable finances through heritage or something else. Everyone has to eat and pay bills so when creating a business you have to figure out how you should have your monthly income, that's a fact. Usually talk about entrepreneurship addresses young entrepreneurs and at the same time there are a lot of middle-aged persons who start their own businesses. Could be interesting to see who will be supported in the future.

When policy-makers talk about entrepreneurship they could talk about facilitating market creation for those who have new ideas. Often healthcare entrepreneurs with terrific ideas see many barriers and this is something that should also be addressed. Maybe you don't have to be a registered nurse to take the blood-pressure of someone?

Last Thursday I listened to a workshop addressing entrepreneurship education (within the nordic entrepreneurship education). One presenter (whose name I cannot remember and it can't be found on the website of the conference either) had researched entrepreneurship education on different levels and came up with four different ways of impact in entrepreneurship education: It's either declarative, functioning, creating or discovering. I hope that I find this research (I think it was someone from Norway and I will find out). I hope that the impact our entrepreneurial education will have lie within these four themes :-). At the moment we are emphasizing the declarative part mainly.

Can I really be cured through a virtual service?

We are living a period where there is a hype about delivering health care services online (monitoring chronic conditions, providing technology to enhance remembering, meeting with your eNurse etc.). It is of course wonderful that I can get assurance by being informed about my health condition and so on. But at this point of time I want to stop this tech-hype a little bit, although I have been an eager fan of being able to stay virtually in contact with my friends and my loved ones. I think that we all know that machines can never replace the physical contact. But how many of you have really tried to be alone and the only caring, is coming by meetings online? When the only real caring love is skype meetings every mornings and evenings? And text messages and phone calls in between? Well, I am in this situation and one day when I was really ill, having backpains, and worried about having something serious it didn't help to talk about that online. When I made an appointment with a doctor who examined my back and put the "finger on my pain" I was in a better shape straight after. So please, you policy makers and technology-based service providers who want to robotize our homes so that we can stay there longer, please remember that we truly need the presence of another person in the same physical space. Nothing can replace the energy of human touch. Or anyway, not in my life.

When do we see elderly as consumers?

When discussing ageing today we usually concentrate on issues about fragility and passivity. Old age is only about sickness and loss and of course this means a financial burden especially in societie's with a welfare-model. At this point of time we want to talk about older people as people that should be taken care of although we also use a rhetoric exclaiming activity as long as we live. This activity discourse is a good path towards empowering and choice but we still have a long way to go. If we see elderly as consumers this brings more action and another voice to elderly. I am sorry to say, but I think that we have to bring consumption into the context of services to elderly to finally give a real voice to them. Other discourses are so easily passivating and although you talk about activating you use a different voice when addressing elderly.

Active and Healthy Ageing

I will soon visit the European Parliament for the first time in my life and I am pretty excited about it. Or maybe I should only pretend that this is something I do every day? Anyway, the theme is Active and Healthy Ageing and I decided that I would like to prepare myself by imagining what I will hear on Thursday. I suppose that we will hear how important it is to create an atmosphere and discourse of activity. No-one should be passive in the future. The mindset is steered towards an active attitude to everything. No-one should say that they just sit and meditate or look at the birds flying around in the garden. With this comment I want to address the danger with talking too much about active this and that, although I know that it is a way of keeping people up and running for a longer time. To age in a healthy way is everybody's goal and we should not even have to write it out. Somehow I feel that within the word healthy there is a nuance of success. If you age in a healthy way you are a successful person. Just think about a person who could be defined as a passive and unhealthy ager....