Initially I started this as a comment for Taneli’s blog entry, but made this as a post after realizing how much I wanted to say about this.

Today in Finland you can hear the word ”innovation” coming from politicians and other officials mouth almost more than “healthcare” and “education”. As much as politicians have something to do with actually curing and educating people they have to do with innovating stuff. The difference is that they know what a school or hospital looks like, but probably they don’t know what an innovation is even it was shoved in their throats.

Politicians seem to think they can get some more of those nice things by educating people more (which actually declines entreprenual probability), throwing more money to people and organizations (well again for most of the time they don’t know what good ideas are) or forcing different kind of people together (Aalto University – okay, it works in theory trough ‘the Medici Effect’).

But what they miss is the actual source of innovations. People. Ideas are almost worthless, resources are usually trivial, but execution is everything.

What makes people execute their ideas? Motivation. Personal motivation can come in different shapes and forms. It can be seek of wealth, personal challenge, achievement, fame, success, can’t let the idea go or all of them. People don’t do great things because of they were educated or have some burning desire to boost the Finnish economy.

Out of those motivational sources, probably the only thing where government can have some influence is ones desire for wealth. If you look at countries that are highly innovative you can probably see that they are also highly rewarding. You can also look back in 1993 when they lowered the capital gains tax rate to 25% here in Finland. In following years this actually led to huge increase of state tax income and lots of professionals jumped to be entrepreneurs. Of course this was not tolerated for long since it’s almost criminal to cumulate more than average wealth in Finland. The only exceptions of cumulating wealth are that if you do it by driving some car, skating on ice or divorcing one of these previously mentioned. Even then you have to actually live in Monaco.

I think that Finns still have some kind of peasant mindset, probably coming from the time we were under foreign influence. We’re a small country with no real friends. We’re afraid to make and dream big things. Even if one would be brave enough of such heresy, others sure are not and you should keep your mouth shut about it as well. One possibility could be also that due of historical and other reasons, we don’t have so many gods living among us – we have very few global brands proportioned to capita.

Innovations are seen complex and almost magical. They are something that some important dudes talk about, doing stuff in their labs and just getting some great ideas while skiing all around Lapland. But what people miss is that anyone can have great ideas, one just needs to execute them.

by Karri Saarinen on Friday, October 17th, 2008.
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