Could the Adoption of Organizational Ambidexterity Have Changed the History of Nokia?

Nokia, more than a century-old company, rose to stardom as the market leader for mobile phones in the 1990s and continued to be so until the early 2000s. Thereafter, the decline of Nokia started. The firm had to sell many of its assets and its mobile phone division to Microsoft. It later became a truncated company and ultimately faded into oblivion. Management and academic experts have analysed the reason for the failure of Nokia from various dimensions. The present work analyses Nokia’s failure from the viewpoint of organizational ambidexterity (OA). OA is defined as the ‘ability to simultaneously explore and exploit, enabling a firm to succeed at adaption over time rather than pursuing limited activities’. This can be considered as the first attempt to analyse the failure of Nokia through the lens of ambidexterity. It is concluded with compelling evidence that the story of Nokia would have been different had it followed exploitation and exploration simultaneously.