Oulu is my favorite town in Finland. Its post Nokia prosperity is most certainly due to Finland's generous social security allowing its people the time and means to recover without having to abandon and emigrate, and also the significant stimulus the state put forward to new entrepreneurial initiatives in the region.<p>There's definitely lessons their for the rest of Europe.
Current Oulu resident here, working in the IT sector as well. Less than ten years ago, atmosphere was quite pessimistic when Nokia was laying off lot of people, which also heavily affected also multiple sub-contractor companies.
However, everything has gone lot better than anyone expected and currently there are more IT sector employees in Oulu than in the golden ages of Nokia.
I think this is a great example why we as a society shouldn't coddle corporations just because they provide jobs. When they fall, others take their place, and many smaller companies make for a much more healthy and dynamic job market than a single monolith.
The question I have is what if any lessons can be taken from Oulo's experience and applied to places like Lordestown, OH (losing their GM plant).<p>On the surface, a big difference seems to be that the current talent pool of Oulo is R&D heavy, vs the assembly labor heavy Rust Belt cities and towns.<p>The workers of Oulo, despite their initial misfortune and pessimism, faced a growing market for their skills - the government just needed to facilitate their transition to a new set of employers and ventures.<p>Does such a market exist for Rust Belt assembly workers? Probably not making the same things they made before - the auto industry is in major turmoil as it transitions to a structurally different transportation future.<p>I'd love to see a future where the collection of assembly skills those workers have are put to use to build the wind turbines and batteries that we desperately need, but it seems like there are both cultural and political hurdles in the way of that happening.
Ah the glorious old days of Oulu FTP...<p><a href="http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/formats/00index.html" rel="nofollow">http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/forma...</a>
The city succeeded to keep talent because they invested in them.<p>Somewhat unrelated but this really reminds me of Germany's Kurzarbeitslosengeld - short working hour unemployment benefits - which was introduced in the crisis years and is given credit why Germany has high employment and the economy quickly recovered after 2009. Companies were allowed to send employees on "part time unemployment" for a certain period of low work. So eg 300 staff get 60% hours and work 3/5 days per week and get 3/5 of their full time salary and in addition 2/5 of what they would get as unemployment benefits. This kept workers in employment, unemployment and benefit payouts low and helped make it easy for companies to keep skilled staff - and for staff to stay in employment and maybe upskill themselves in their spare time.<p>The scheme had some issues but overall a similarly positive impact.<p>I wish more countries & companies would recognise the benefits of investing in and catering for staff, rather than to see workers as replaceable widgets.
I like to take every opportunity to tell people, I had the pleasure of working with a lot of folks from Nokia. They were the most talented and hardest working people I have encountered in my 30 years in the IT Industry (and I have been around).<p>The Company was overflowing with brilliant people and was a wonderful employer.
The bridge program sounds amazing, not sure I grokked it correctly and the article only mentions it in passing but it sounds like they let some of the staff they made redundant take some of the firm's IP with them to help them strike out on their own? Does anyone have more details on this?
So you had a company that dominated the highest growing market in the world, and now you have a bunch of barely profitable startups and small businesses, and that's supposed to be a great outcome?
Nokia is a perfect example of corporate arrogance: “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost” said the CEO at the time. Yet they did everything wrong.