Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.
China being less innovative than the US over the last 20 years might owe much to their population starting the era in absolute poverty, and is largely irrelevant to whether a linguistically isolated small country ought to be leading the world in more fields of R&D other than telephony.
A little further research suggests that Finland also invented IRC and one of the first graphical web browsers. If you were going to draw any conclusions about the impact on educational emphasis on equality on Finnish inventiveness it would surely be that their software engineers weren't as focused on monetising as their US counterparts.
Not yet.
Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can.
Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement.
And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)
> Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.
Not yet.
The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy.
Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)
Not to mention that the bilateral trade with Soviet Union (that employed much of the country until late 80s) didn't really promote innovation.