Abstract: Finland, pioneered today´s ubiquitous mobile-phone services, the launch-pad for Nordic wireless industries. This historical study seeks to understand how state bureaucracies like PLH could realise world-transforming innovations, first the pre-cellular services, especially Finland´s ARP, and then the jointly developed NMT, helping to launch the European GSM project. The case description is interpreted against the concept-frame considering innovation, entrepreneurship, and institutional effects. Proposed conducing elements include entrepreneurship, strategic foresight, and international open innovation, attributes not often associated with monopolistic bureaucracies. Favourable institutional environment played a role, and considerable luck. Besides describing how PLH, an early laggard even among its Nordic peers, emerged as the first holistic account on early mobile communications development globally, and the concept-frame for institutionally embedded entrepreneurial innovation by a monopoly.