 Hi and welcome. I'm Beth Pardleton. I'm with the Board of Directors for PMI, Project Management Institute. And today I have the honor of speaking with Marcus Weldon. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Nokia and the President of Nokia Bell Labs. Welcome, Marcus. Thanks very much for having me. So this isn't your first time at Web Summit. So what do you get out of coming to Web Summit? Why is it important? Well, Web Summit for us is one of the world's largest tech conferences. It allows us to stay in contact with the technology innovator ecosystem. Running Bell Labs, we're a tremendously innovative organization, but we would never be arrogant enough to say we innovate and create everything. So we always like to be in contact with the larger ecosystem of innovators, at small, medium, large, to understand what's going on in the world outside our doors. We have strong connections through our network of alumni, Bell Labs, 90 years old, so you can imagine how many scientists have gone through Bell Labs, now are professors or members of industry or startups. We have a lot of networks that we have day-to-day, but it's still great to see what's going on in the heartbeat of technology innovation and Web Summit is the place to do that, I think. Can you tell me a little bit about what Nokia Bell Labs does versus what Nokia does? I mean, where do you draw the line with your research and development? Well, I am schizophrenic, of course. I have two jobs and two personalities. So my CTO role, Chief Technology Officer, sets the direction for the company on, let's say, a five-year horizon. The Bell Labs part is the research part that actually thinks about what that five-year horizon should be maybe even ten years before that horizon. So think of Bell Labs being research that thinks ten years out and then it helps me and my other personalities to say, OK, if that's what ten years looks like, we need to move the company here within five years because, of course, you want to be in the right place at the right time to be a leader in the next phase of technology. So simply put, Nokia does development, Nokia Bell Labs does research. You combine those and, as we said earlier, I'm the and function. And when I and correctly, then we're inventing a bright future but also being practical and taking the right steps on the three- to five-year horizon that the company needs. How hard is it to have a ten-year horizon in technology? It's pretty hard. It must be difficult. But there are tricks and I'll give away some of the secrets. This is the headline. This is the headline news. One is most things repeat. So you can actually look back to see how things repeated in the past and you think, well, that sounds a bit uninteresting or surprising even. But in fact, most things are driven by human needs. Whether it's an industrial human need, an enterprise human need or a consumer human need. And those things don't change. Humans actually, if you've read Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, humans don't actually change their needs. How would they manifest themselves change? So we actually tend to look back and say, what was it that caused a transition in the past? Ah, it was that. So now we see what we need to make that next version of a transition. So by looking back, you can learn a lot. The 90 years of history of Bell Labs is actually surprisingly useful because we've seen many transitions which makes you good at spotting the next transition as long as you think about what was the fundamental driver. And then you can normally see, ah, that driver is reappearing for some reason. I can talk about how we see 5G being a new driver and I think it'll make a lot of sense. And of course then the other is hire new people. We hire hundreds of new people a year into Bell Labs to keep it fresh and vibrant. Come to Web Summit, see what's going on in the larger ecosystem. And a combination of those things helps you see with a 10-year horizon. Oh, I shouldn't forget a bit of science fiction. Okay. A bit of Star Trek here and there, Star Trek thinking. That might be 30-year horizon, but very often those 30 to 50-year horizons come true sooner than you would think. So a bit of Star Trek or science fiction thinking doesn't go a mess either. Oh, that sounds fun. It is fun. One of my jobs is to think about science fiction-y things, right? Work on quantum computing and quantum teleportation if you like, state change or state transfer. Those sort of more forward-looking things. But I'll give you an example. We all said that in Star Trek there's a thing called the replicator that makes things, if you remember Star Trek. Well, that's a 3D printer really. And so 3D printers have come to pass. The communicator, the thing you tapped and you could speak to the bridge, is just our smartphone. So many of those things were predicted or anticipated 10, 20, 30 years in reality. So it helps to actually look through that lens because good science fiction has a logic to why that thing should exist. So it actually can give you a view into something that should exist and you can incorporate that into your thinking. We don't have a Star Trek transporter yet though. We do not. But good point. A lot of the quantum teleportation stuff is sort of the principle of being able to transfer a state over a distance. I think that one will be resolved by not breaking his apart molecularly. I hope not. I think if I could transfer how you were feeling and being sensed completely to someone else in the other side of the world, that would sort of be teleportation. So we actually do work in Bell Labs on the idea. If I could completely understand your state now as we're talking and send that to someone else and they could feel how you're feeling, that would be pseudo teleportation. It's a bit exciting but also creepy. Who should you let know how you're feeling currently? So you need some filters. Think of that as future comms would be transferring your complete state, not just your voice or your video. So there are elements of that that will probably come to fruition. Wow. Although you're on the leading edge of technology, you still have to do some company transformations, I'm sure from time to time. And now everyone's talking about digital transformation, some kind of transformation. What's going on at Nokia Bell Labs? Yeah, so we do indeed do a lot of transformation. I think the way I think about it is we actually transform ourselves by transforming the outside world. So a lot of what we do is create technologies that will be the future version of how people connect and communicate. And so one way to do that is to work with partners. So we learn a lot by working with partners in the ecosystem. So I think the way we see 5G is it's all about increasing productivity in enterprise, in industrials, in society, and in consumer life. So the way you do, you figure that out, is by actually working with those companies. But you do it by deeply embedding with those companies, not just throwing something over the wall saying, here, try that. We think it's a good idea to have this new technology. So by deeply embedding, you learn. And when you learn, you bring it back inside, of course. So I think a lot of what we do in the 5G space also helps us think about the efficiency we should be achieving because we're in enterprise too. So we're telling others how they should be improving their efficiency. We actually are a large enterprise of 100,000 employees. So we take that back in-house. So a specific example, we've built a future lab in New Jersey where we experiment with all the future technologies and have converted the Murray Hill campus into a highly-sensorized, highly-automated, AI-enabled networked infrastructure where we can see people moving and vehicles moving and sense everything. And we're figuring out what that means for the future of an enterprise. In ULU in Finland, we've built an essentially self-optimizing AI-enabled factory that actually makes our equipment. So we're learning by those two things with a lot of robot tasks, a lot of humans interacting with robots. We achieve much higher productivity, much higher quality, much better Six Sigma improvement by building this highly-automated factory, which is also what we're talking to others about but we build it internally. So it helps our product today. It helps us learn about how we can educate others as to the transformation they can undergo. And of course, it improves our business on a daily basis. So we're a weird innovator in that we invent the external world but in doing so, we also transform ourselves. Do you consider your transformation currently as an ongoing process that will never end or do you kind of have like a horizon where you're trying to accomplish a certain transformation? It's a very good question because Nokia is one of the oddest in a good way companies. If you look at about every 20 years it's become a completely different company. So it started in, if I remember correctly, a paper mill company in Finland because there's a lot of birch trees and things so it was a paper mill company. At some point it gets into rubber and made rubber boots, then tires, then at some point it was in televisions, then it was in mobile phones as we talked about. Now it's in mobile networks but there's this every 20 year transformation which I think is a testament to, one is there's a sense of longevity to the company that guides its decision making but secondly, the idea that the world does change and you have to react to that but there's no barrier to the thought that we could be a completely different company in 20 years. In fact, it's almost expected. So to answer your question, I think we expect to be a very different company in 20 years and we're thrilled by the prospect of that not frightened by the prospect of that because of 150 years of history. So again, history helps because it gives you perspective I think that allows you to be... So it sounds like your transformation is going to be relatively continuous. Continuous and it's 150 years old is what I would say. Before transformation was even a popular word. It used to evolve because the business went away and so now we are pre-transformative. I want to thank you for joining me today with Brightline and enjoy your website. Thanks very much, lovely chatting to you.