
The Nordic region is becoming a hothouse of entrepreneurship (2013) - martincmartin
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570834-nordic-region-becoming-hothouse-entrepreneurship-if-doubt-innovate?fb_ref=activity
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amirmc
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.

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bjelkeman-again
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.

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Gravityloss
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...

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tuukkah
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.

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tuukkah
_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](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.

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ersii
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).

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durbin
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.

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

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durbin
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.

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davidgerard
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!).

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denzil_correa
The article is dated Jan 31st 2013.

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dang
Thanks. We added that to the title.

