The Nordic region is becoming a hothouse of entrepreneurship (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Nordic region is becoming a hothouse of entrepreneurship (2013)

economist.com

84 pointsmartincmartin14 comments

From a comment on the article:

"Great article, but with slight historical revisionism: Tekes was established in 1983 and Finnvera was created in 1999, when Nokia was still on its way up. The roots of Finland's national innovation system go back to 1960 and 1970s. Even Nokia's original success is partly attributed to this system. It is incorrect to portray its creation as a response to Nokia's recent troubles."

In other words, it takes sustained long term effort and thinking to promote innovation.

The general narrative today about something like this often seems to forget what came before. For example the music industry in Sweden is doing very well and most people I hear talking about why mentions the musical schooling kids get from the beginning as a source. But the narrative about this doesn't often mention this in my experience, as it is probably considered a boring story.

This is in stark contrast to Finnish music and physical education traditions which have large parts of repression, humiliation and army-like strict control. Depends a lot on the teacher you have...

This definitely used to be the case 20 years ago or so, but I would say Finland has done well in music and sports for a country of 6 million people.

True, Nokia got a lot of phone (maybe even most) networking and mobile phone technology from the government company Televa which it cunningly took over in the eighties. Companies' histories are often little known.

Helsinki started to host a festival for gamers in the early 1990s.

Importantly, what they really mean is a festival for multimedia programming, the Assembly demo party: "The first Assembly was held from July 24 to July 26, 1992, in Kauniainen. It was organized by the Amiga demo groups Complex and Rebels, and the PC demo group Future Crew." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_%28demo_party%29

There's a chapter to be written about the last year with the exits including Nokia Devices to Microsoft Mobile, Supercell to the Japanese GungHo, and Moves to Facebook. These prove the existence of liquidity and create more for the next startups.

I do not consider it strange, like the 2013 Economist article does, that "too many successful start-ups choose to sell themselves to foreign markets/multinationals instead of being local champions" - considering how small the Swedish and Finnish markets are. I don't find it strange that they take capital from foreign investors either - since I assume it's harder to get investment locally.

According to the 2014 estimate, Finland has a population of 5,457,429 and Sweden has a population of 9,658,301 according to the 2013 census. If we add them up, that's a total of 15,115,730 (15.1M).

Not as surprising when you realize that 95% of tech startups in Silicon Valley are built on a foundation of Finnish software - Linux and MySQL.

One of the MySQL founders is Finnish, but it was in Sweden. (InnoDB was Finnish, iirc.)

Many people consider the Finnish founder, Michael Widenius, to be the main author of MySQL and it was named after his daughter My. I would definitely consider it to be Finnish software at the very least equal to, if not more than, Swedish.

and SSH and IRC...

Not really. Rovio did in fact try to extend the brand and get new brands going. But nobody was interested in anything except Angry Birds, so now they're just pushing that brand - rather than come up with a new brand for a new game, they just shove the Angry Birds into it (e.g., Angry Birds Go!).

The article is dated Jan 31st 2013.

Thanks. We added that to the title.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com