electronrun.com

In technological comparisons between the EU and the US it is almost always forgotten that in both blocks a few states contribute a large piece of the technological pie and raise the average that eventually appears in the statistics. This state for the US is of course good old California. In the EU, although Germany is still the industrial powerhouse, in technological terms the top spot has been clinched by much less known Finland. Considered as frozen backwater up to the start of the 80s and often joked at by its swede neighbours, Finland consistently appears in the world’s technological top positions for more than ten years now, fighting with the likes of South Korea, Singapore and Japan!

A very interesting post by CNET discussed the very issue of Finland’s ascent to technological fame and how its Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen explains this success. Like in all things tech, good planning and farsighted investment are critical. And in this Finland has excelled, as it has decided from the early 80s that head on competition with low labour cost economies is not wise and it was better to move in high tech fields where it can be ahead of the pack.

Although Nokia is now hitting 40% of the world’s mobile telephone market, there is a whole number of Finish companies that not only supply Nokia with critical components and software, but are leaders in their fields. All this is the fruit of generous long term investment in two major areas, education and R&D. Education because human resources are the ingredient that can make or break the whole deal in the globalized environment, if people cannot keep up, operations nowadays can be moved elsewhere quite easily. R&D because it is the ingredient that keeps the country’s companies ahead of the competition. Apart from the fact that R&D absorbs 3.5% of GDP -the highest in the EU- it is all done very cleverly with two thirds coming from the private sector and focus on projects that have commercial value.

Finland is heavily promoted as a tech hub, with its Prime Minister having a lot of contacts in the US and a permanent silicon valley office called FinNode to promote exchange of ideas and cooperation. Despite its technological prowess, Finland is aware that an ecological catastrophe would spell trouble for the future and is doing its part to ease tension on the environment. As the Finish Prime Minister has correctly admitted, the world’s environmental problem does not have satisfactory immediate solutions. But we can be sure that Finish think-tanks are already assessing investments in new green technology…

Link: CNET news