Jari Toivanen is shifting gears from connecting people to connecting everything with Treon

In the era of the Internet of Things, where everything is looking to connect with everything else, you can really use someone who has successfully been connecting people for decades already. Jari Toivanen, CEO of the newly founded product development company Treon, joined a small product development team at Nokia in 1993 and left the company, then Microsoft, in the summer of 2016. The 23 years were spent in an endless pursuit of the best possible technological solution, user experience and product design. Toivanen is the driving force behind many iconic Nokia phone concepts, from the first smart-phone ever (Nokia N9000) to a range of Eseries business focused smartphones and many of the of high volume affordable Lumia devices. Jari has undeniably left his fingerprint to the history of smartphones through tens of millions sold phones.

Now Toivanen and his team are bringing the legendary Nokia product making expertise to life with Treon. The company’s expertise is applicable well beyond smartphones to any industry.

According to Toivanen good product development is founded on solid expertise and driven by a clear vision.

”You have to understand the product from the mechanics to the electronics, software and the industrial design to integrate it all into an efficient and user friendly product. The key is to know what you’re looking to achieve so that you can optimize every single element towards those goals. Are you optimizing for cost, design, product size or performance? This in turn comes down to vision and leadership. Decisions must be made. Some of them may be controversial. You have to be able to listen to your team of experts and then make decisions that carry out the vision, perhaps discarding some of those opinions you’ve just heard,” he says.

There is currently huge demand for the competence and technological knowledge related to connectivity, compact product integration, implementing multi radio-systems and optimizing antennas and product performance.

“At Nokia we succeeded in creating so many amazing and innovative products because we had vision, purpose, ambition and creative freedom combined with the best engineering expertise. It was a happy union of industrial design, usability and clever engineering. The technological solutions, product functionality and concepts we worked so hard in the mobile industry to create, develop and advance in the past 25 years are now making their way to the everyday items we all use in our daily lives and of course to industrial equipment and processes,” says Toivanen.

There is a clear pattern: bigger screens, haptics, rich user interfaces, wireless connectivity and cloud-based services can soon be found in anything from coffee machines to cars. Treon is ready to take on the most challenging cases in every industry.

“This is exactly where Treon’s experience and expertise is worth its weight in gold. We are looking to solve the impossible cases,” states Toivanen.

A product maker finds inspiration in the impossible

Treon’s focus is on hardware product development. The passion for creating great products is what inspires the company’s owners and employees who all have a background at Nokia and Microsoft.

“There are a million ways one can ruin a user experience and much fewer solutions to make it great. The experience and talent at Treon will be of use to many companies in the coming years. As a partner, we are agile and help our clients focus on the right issues early in the process.”

Toivanen and his team at Treon work with both start-ups and industry giants. The team has global experience from working in every kind of product development project – big and small.

“During my career, the biggest reward has been to see the finished products out there: in the hands of satisfied customers everywhere in the world. This is what we are always looking to achieve in Treon as well. Our clients’ focus is on their products and services. Our expertise in connectivity, usability and hardware concept design connects the product and the data it produces safely and efficiently to the world around the product. It’s something to be excited about, just like all the other projects and missions I’ve been a part of so far,“ Toivanen says with a smile.