Finnish engineers discover there is life after Nokia

The decline of Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has encouraged a whole generation of local engineers to venture on a new and riskier path: that of entrepreneurship.
Housed on the top floor of a building located on the main avenue of the southern city of Tampere, the office of local start-up TreLab exudes ambition and optimism.
“We just sent our first five-figure invoices. It feels good!” 44-year-old chief executive Kimmo Saarela said.
This former Nokia employee joined four colleagues to create in December 2011 a start-up specializing in wireless measurement devices, which can be used in sectors such as health care, logistics and personal wellness and training.
“Even if I sometimes miss the comfort of a regular salary and the job security provided by Nokia, I feel freer here. One can make decisions quickly, without going through all the bureaucracy of a big firm,” he said.
In the early 2000s, when Nokia reigned supreme in the global mobile phone market and contributed four percent to Finland’s gross domestic product, the job security offered by the company had no match.
“When you were a Finnish engineer starting at Nokia, you knew you would leave Nokia only when retiring. Your future was clear,” recalls Tommi Uhari, who left his management position to found Uros, a mobile wireless Internet provider for international travelers.
Everything changed when the financial crisis hit and Nokia fell behind in the smartphone race after Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007.
Trapped in a failure spiral, Nokia started to lay off white-collar staff and ended up agreeing in September to sell its mobile phone division to US giant Microsoft for 5.44 billion euro ($7.5 billion) in a move considered by local media as “the end of an era for Finland.” When it began to need to downsize a few years back, the firm launched an uncommon initiative named the Nokia Bridge program, through which it helped its former employees to create their own companies.
TreLab, the Tampere start-up, benefited from the program, which allowed former employees to leave the company with up to 20,000 euros ($27,573) each.
Some engineers, the founders of TreLab among them, even got the right to use certain technologies they had developed at Nokia without having to buy any expensive patents.
“Without this support, we probably wouldn’t have been able to create our company,” Saarela said.