This is a pretty meaningless cumulative metric which considers things like "Legal obstacles to foreign labour", "ICT priority for government", "Graduates in science", "Schools connected to the internet", "Telecom revenue", "Nature of competitive advantage" and many other, some of which are pretty hard to measure [1]. I wouldn't count such a metric as a measure of "volume of innovation".
[1] https://www.innovendo.net/pdf/archiv/Global%20innovation%20i...
My point is that having these Union collective bargaining agreements doesn't impact innovation in either # of successful startups or just general country innovation metrics.
> Stockholm is surprisingly innovative
This is only when you do an intellectually dishonest trick of comparing Stockholm the city to american states capita-wise. If you compare Stockholm (0.8 unicorns per capita) to other large cities, it will lag behind NY (1.48 UpC), Boston (3.5), Austin (1.0), Denver (1.4) etc.
How?
30 in Stockholm, population of ~950,000 21 in Boston, population of ~650,000 7 in Denver, population of ~700,000 etc...
I was going off of government info [0] but if you manually check you'll find it still works out albeit unicorns change pretty often at the moment.
[0] https://start.stockholm/en/about-the-city-of-stockholm/how-t...
edit: Okay Boston might have 31 [1], but while you're comparing leading cities to Stockholm you still have the remainder of the US which brings innovation rankings down. My overall point that Sweden has a decent level of innovation & startups (per capita) while maintaining a much better standard of living still stands IMO.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/greater-boston-area-unicorn-s...
It would be strange to compare a capital of one country to the countryside of another.