by Sampo Hämäläinen - Tech Crunch, Jun. 16, 2015 –
Last autumn I moved back to Finland after spending five years in the U.K. and Germany, building Futurice’s international offices. The Finland I returned to was a very different economy from the one I’d left -- no more AAA rating or Nokia phones.
The startup boom here is hot, thanks to mobile gaming, Aaltoes and Slush, but it will take a long time to fill the gap in Finland’s total productivity, which is now lower than it was during the big crisis in the mid-90s.
Finland, like others across Europe, is a country of industrial manufacturing and high-tech skills, but it’s facing a rapidly changing environment. It’s a small country hit hard by a few major changes inside a short period of time: iPads ate the markets of two economic cornerstones, Nokia and the paper industry; the Russian export business declined rapidly; and the population, like many in Western European nations, is aging at an alarming rate.
So what will it take for Finland to recover its status as a tech nation? Or has its time come and gone, and it should be looking at alternatives? A look into the past may help us answer some of these questions.