How Nokia plans to turn its implosion into a 'transition'

The news around Nokia has been understandably negative recently, with some calling its collapse "one of the most spectacular implosions in the history of business."

Last month, Nokia lost its top spot as the world's largest cell phone manufacturer. Last week, it announced a reduction of 10,000 jobs globally by Q4 of 2013.

So the critical question: is this an implosion, or just transition? The deciding factor may lie with Nokia's intellectual property.

High stakes transitions are a normal part of business evolution. In 2004, I joined the intellectual property (IP) group in DuPont's Kevlar and Nomex division. DuPont is a 200 year old company which started by making gunpowder, and has made several successful transformations since. From its IP strategy to its product development investments, I saw DuPont clearly understood the nested s-curves of transformation and reinvention.

Nokia has been planning its transition to Windows since 2011, and is now starting to deliver on its promises. To support the birth of that platform, Nokia CFO Timo Ihamuotila disclosed last month that Nokia plans to be more aggressive about making money from its IP, which reportedly was already generating over $600 million per year in revenue, including royalties from Microsoft and Apple. Nokia was also was considering the sale of a portion of its patent portfolio.

Typically, patents are most important at three stages in a company's development: start-up, transition, and wind-down. When in transition, aggressively leveraging IP can help stabilize earnings while product revenue declines temporarily. Nokia recently accelerated its IP monetization efforts with a kind of shock-and-awe strategy, by simultaneously suing HTC, Research in Motion, and ViewSonic over 45 patents in eleven jurisdictions in both the U.S. and Germany.

Many patent professionals immediately recognized Nokia's move as virtually identical to Kodak's transition strategy. In the years before its bankruptcy, Kodak generated over $1 billion in licensing revenue. Back in January, it sued both HTC and Research in Motion for patent infringement while trying to run a sales process on over 1,000 non-core digital imaging patents. It also promoted the head of IP, Laura Quatela, to general counsel, then to president and COO.

While few questioned the soundness of Kodak's IP strategy, many have argued that Kodak did not act quickly or aggressively enough.

Nokia has a long history of successful innovations in smartphones, and that is reflected in its substantial IP arsenal. In the U.S. alone, Nokia has over 8,000 patent grants and 4,000 pending patent applications, despite selling over 2,000 patents to Mosaid last year.

By comparison, HTC has roughly ten times fewer patents and has been relying on Google to come to its rescue for IP protection, such as when HTC tried to sue Apple for patent infringement in 2011. But many of the patents that Google acquired from Motorola have already been licensed to Nokia, so it is unlikely that HTC will have much leverage in these negotiations.

It's now clear that Nokia isn't going to fall into the same trap as Kodak with respect to IP. Although it dismissed several senior executives last week, I wouldn't be surprised to see Paul Melin, vice president of intellectual property at Nokia, elevated the same way Laura Quatela was at Kodak.

In general, there are four primary objectives in developing a patent portfolio:

At this stage in its transition, revenue generation is clearly Nokia's key patent strategy. After $650 million in revenue from IP last year, it makes sense that the company would focus further on IP as a business. Typically, IP licensing produces almost pure profit; considering Nokia lost over $1 billion in 2011, it's possible that a focus on IP could very well make the difference between transition and implosion.