11 August 2008

Nokia Pilots Program, new co-creation
initiative complementing Beta Labs

To answer questions concerning Nokia’s new program called Nokia Pilots, Mikko Lintunen from Nokia Pilots Team has just posted an extremely detailed explanation of the whole project which basically gives you a unique opportunity to get involved in Nokia's creative process.

In essence Nokia Pilots is an umbrella program that helps get Nokia users around the world involved in our creative development process.

The program acts as a channel for users to share their ideas and suggest improvements that we can put into action as we try to create the best products and services possible. Our focus is to trial new concepts that may only exist in protype creations as well as trialling latest services, SW and devices which may not yet available in the market or ones we have not yet publicly announced.

We run Nokia Pilot projects involving Nokia Pilot users from a variety of countries and with diverse motivations and interests. This variety helps us get a broad range of the most relevant feedback, and helps us develop the best possible solutions for users of Nokia products and services.

We are giving a few selected participants the chance to participate in real product development. What we mean by few is that we match our Nokia Pilot candidates interests to the different projects we are working on. In cases where the interests and Pilots user profiles match we will invite you to dedicated arenas where we are able to share information we would otherwise not be able to do. As a Nokia Pilot, you will become an advisor to our development teams from around the world. Nokia Pilots program offers an opportunity to be involved in the design, development and/or testing phases of concepts, products and/or services - as a Nokia Pilot, you may get a chance to see the latest products and services before anyone else.

I have been also asked few times why we do this. The answer is obvious. Only together can we explore the different perspectives, views and motivations underneath the demand landscape and richness of cultures. Of course the other point is that we truly believe that by involving users around the world we can become better at creating more interesting and exiting stuff. We also just want to give users with different needs and motivations a chance to try out new stuff and let us know what they think about it.

The difference to Beta Labs is quite clear cut. Beta Labs can share applications, content and services for trial usage to thousands and hundreds of thousands of users in an open platform. Nokia Pilots program is in contrast allowing Nokia’s different development teams, who’s work is still classified and in many cases not made public, to share their ideas with Nokia Pilots. Having said that, there is a need to restrict the access to this type of material and content. Thus, we require in some cases non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s) with Nokia Pilots. The other difference is that we are dealing also with physical products which require different systems to support their testing.

We have agreed together with Tommi Vilkamo, manager of Beta Labs that recognized contributors in Beta Labs can later register to Nokia Pilots program with Beta Labs endorsement tag. In general the best candidates for particular programs are pre-screened with our automatic search algorithm but this way we may be able to offer some exclusive opportunities to Beta Labs members.

The registration to Nokia Pilots starts this September. We will post the registration links to our home page as well as other selected sites. We do not restrict the number of registered users in general.