With 11 Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards, you could easily hypothesize that Nokia Bell Labs stands alone when it comes to cornering the market on innovation.
Thierry Klein doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
Klein, the president of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia Bell Labs, certainly is proud of the rich history of innovation at one of the most famous research facilities in the world, but he feels great innovation does not come in isolation but through collaboration — with industry, academia and companies, both large and small.
Nokia Bell Labs, Klein said, always is eager to find partners.
“We do not have a monopoly on innovation,” he said last week during a fireside chat discussion at the 2024 Middlesex County Business Summit. “We definitely want to partner with our customers, but also with new industrial partners, startups, ecosystem players – large and small – because a lot of different ideas come from talking to multiple people and a diverse set of people.”
He then offered a welcoming thought to the few hundred gathered in the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.
“Consider this as an open invitation to talk to us,” he said.
Klein was one of the keynote speakers at what always is a top-notch event. Gov. Phil Murphy gave opening remarks, while N.J. Economic Development Authority CEO Tim Sullivan and Yahoo Finance Senior Health Care Reporter Anjalee Khemlani also did one-on-one interviews. There were panels and breakout sessions, too.
The focus this year was on innovation. Klein helped add collaboration to the discussion. Without it, he said, you can have very little to show for your efforts.
“I can think up something in the lab, come up with technology, and then it turns out that it’s actually not solving a problem that anybody in the real world has,” he said. “We’re not doing research for research’s sake.”
Working with partners – understanding what their needs are – is key. At Bell Labs, it starts with validating that research actually is solving a real problem, Klein said.
“We want it to have a demonstrable impact on society,” he said.
And not just for today, Klein said, but for years to come.
“We don’t do incremental work,” he said. “We don’t think about just solving a problem that’s right in front of us to make something 10% better. We’re thinking in terms of generations.”
And thinking about all possible collaborations – and in all possible places.
Klein said Nokia Bell Labs collaborates with companies of all sizes and sectors across the state, the nation and the world. Earlier this fall, it announced a partnership with a telecom operator in Dubai.
The range doesn’t stop there.
Nokia Bell Labs also announced that it is working to bring cellular communication and connectivity to the moon as part of the Artemis program.
Klein said it’s all part of Nokia’s Bell Labs to innovate for the future.
“If you think about us having a more sustained presence on the moon, and not just going for a day and then coming back, but really sustaining presence with an economy and all aspects of what that entails, it is absolutely clear that you need communication,” he said.
“We’re the leaders in communication; we need to work on that.”
In 2028, that work will be done in New Brunswick at the HELIX, where Nokia Bell Labs is building a state-of-the-art research and office facility.
The move is the ultimate example of the desire of Nokia Bell Labs to collaborate – and to work with the future in mind.
When its current facility in Murray Hill opened in 1942, it was done specifically in a remote area, enabling research to be done internally and without distraction from the outside world.
That philosophy doesn’t work today, Klein said.
Klein said Nokia Bell Labs wanted to support its researchers and engineers not only with the latest state-of-the-art technology and equipment, but in a collaborative space that was easily accessible to others – up and down the East Coast and around the world.
“We looked at what is important, not just for me and my generation now, but the next 5, 10, 20 years and beyond,” he said.
Klein said Nokia Bell Labs wanted to be part of an ecosystem of large companies and startups, academia and universities.
“And we wanted to make a very easily accessible environment for an infrastructure perspective – stores, restaurants, cafes and shops,” he said.
“When we looked around, and we really looked very broadly, we realized there was not one single building that meets all of our requirements. Then we came to New Brunswick, and we saw (the plans for) the HELILX,), and we said, ‘This is perfect’
“It was literally on the spot, everybody unanimously said, ‘This is the right place for us.’”
In every possible way, Klein told the crowd.
“I want to emphasize that if we took that exact same building and we put it in Murray Hill, it wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “It would be missing a lot of other dimensions that we really care about, from access to infrastructure, ecosystem, and collaboration of community.
“So, it is really not just the building, it’s really where the building is, and the relationships and the connections you make around the building.”
