innovation in finland

A look at innovation in Finland


LORD OF THE RINGS author JRR Tolkien discovered the Finnish language at Oxford and, because it had 15 cases, fell in love with it. A specialist in Old Norse, he quickly learnt it; and the Finnish epic Kalevala, which he read in the original, became a powerful inspiration for his work. The language, meanwhile, formed the base for Elvish, one of the many make-believe languages that he constructed in full that give his world of Middle Earth its depth, detail and believability.
In a letter to WH Auden in 1955, he wrote: "Finnish was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language'-or series of invented languages-became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure."
One wonders if Tolkien also took his inspiration for ways and manners of the elves, the superior race of his imaginary world, from the Finns. Although they have the highest incidence of blond hair in the world, many Finns have high cheek bones and slightly almond-shaped eyes. Like elves. They also tended to live in forest isolation, strong of character, and have a mysterious, detached approach towards the world. Like elves. But there is a difference. The elves had magic. The Finns have technology.
Actually they are not so different. Who was it who said that, from a certain perspective, magic and sufficiently advanced technology are almost indistinguishable? Here is a list of what the Finns are up to.
Nokia, which makes a million handsets a day, is developing three sensational phones.
Nano technology is producing miracles. The latest project is a shape changing handset that you flex from its candybar shape and wrap around your wrist or stretch to keyboard dimensions; a second handset under development will allow you to take a photo of an object that instantly gives you web descriptions about it; a third collects data about traffic flows based on the GPS satellite readings of the users’ movements; which are then collated with everyone else’s to build up a picture of the traffic situation – beamed back to the users, of course, who can avoid the traffic snarl ups that cost billions of dollars a year. And that’s just Nokia.. Linus Torvalds, a Finn from the Swedish minority, invented the open source Linux software that despite, or rather because, anyone can contribute has a stability and portability that makes it a favoured choice to run mobile phones, gaming consoles, and 85 percent of the world’s super computers. .
And there’s more.
The country awards the Millennium Prize in Technology, which has been sarcastically called the Nobel prize of Finnish Vanity, and whose first recipient Tim Berners Lee admitted he first heard of it when he received it. But its one million euros are not to be sniffed at. There’s Fogscreen, the world's first walk-through projection screen made of "dry" fog, which allows you to project images onto it. They will seem suspended in
mid-air, “a bit like star wars”, Fogscreen was invented by two virtual reality researchers from the university of Turku. There’s Habbo Hotel, one of the largest social networking sites, where teenagers use avatars to furnish their rooms, gossip, play games, say bubba to each other (sexual words are bleeped out) and spend their parents’ money on intra website credits. It too is Finnish.
Finland had the most boring television outside the east bloc in the 1970s. They seem to be compensating by inventing Floobs, which allows anyone to set up their own television channel on the internet.
On a more serious note, there’s Fiinnvoice, the electronic invoicing system which will be the model for the Single European payment area due to come onstream in 2010, facilitating and harmonising and making electronic the way European firms and individuals bill each other. Finland’s Neste’s biodiesel, NExBTL, is the perfect biofuel. Finally, there’s Finland’s RFID revolution, where patients are not restricted to the waiting room as they have electronic tags and nurses download data straight to a computer from the sickbed.
Backing examples with figures, Finland is the world’s leading patent applicant per capita, the second most competitive economy (and its greenest one) in 2006; ;second most innovative in Europe.

Why are the Finns so successful? British educators take note.
Tolkien used the prerogatives of a writer to invent a favoured race; The Finns have had to resort to hard work, native sisu (guts), and recently, a fortunate turn of events But, above all, its comprehensive education system has long been the best in the world. In the OECD rankings, Finland came first by a long way in science, and narrowly beaten to second in reading and maths by Korea and Taiwan: overall first, way ahead of other European countries. It’s achieved this feat not through throwing money at schools – the Finns spend less than theUK – but old fashioned virtues. Teachers are respected, entry to the profession is competitive. The weak students are marked out early and looked after. In fact, the difference between top and bottom students was lowest of all countries surveyed. Communications between parents and teachers is good; society is homogenous. Finland always had a free peasantry; and Lutheranism placed a premium on literacy even among the poor.
Add to the educational achievements, a slow increase in liberalisation and deregulation, which a tough recession in the early 1990s helped focus into a political consensus about refocusing the associated economic policies. The collapse of the Soviet Union liberated the national spirit.
The Finns have had a tough time from their neighbours: the Orcs to the elvish Finns. The Soviets invaded in November 1939 with an army five times as large possessed of 100 times as many tanks. The Finns had advantages in the celebrated Winter War: they knew the terrain, were experts on skis and wore white smocks.
. Their opponents had khaki uniforms and clung to the roads,. The Finns ambushed, splintering and isolating Soviet units, and targeted their soup kitchens. It was the coldest winter in memory. They chopped trees and left the stumps and logs as tank traps, covered cellophane over their frozen lakes to make the lakes seem free of ice to discourage crossing. They made uninhabitable their farmsteads as they withdrew and mined the saunas and latrines. When the war ended.a Russian general said: “We have gained just enough territory to bury our dead.” While a Finnish general said; “The wolves will eat well this year.” The Finns killed 10 Russians for every one of their own; but the Soviet Union was just too big. The Finns made peace with honour, with some concessions. But they lost the continuation war; when they joined the Nazis in a revenge attack. A price, though, was subservience to the USSR in foreign affairs, This ended in 1991; and the salutary recession shortly after. Their flourishing of the last decade could begin.

But there are dangers ahead. They never cease. Again, we can dip into Tolkien. One of the motifs running through his books is hatred of industrialisation and its consequences. The peasant goodness of the Shire contrasts with the industrial might of Mordor. In a key turning point in the story, the treacherous wizard Saruman embarks on a crash course of industrialisation, turning the countryside around his castle into a hellish landscape of mines and foundries.. Later, he attempts to do the same to the Shire. Perhaps the greatest threat the Finns face is not a resurgent Russia, again interested in its western, more prosperous neighbour, but the consequences of industrialisation: this winter, temperatures were six degrees above normal. A Met office map over global climate fluctuations this year marks out the Baltic sea in warning signal red. The university of Tartu in Estonia estimates that summers are a month longer than twenty years ago; winters in those days saw the whole 500,000 square kilometres of Baltic freeze over, as far west and south as Denmark.
It didn’t snow in Helsinki this year. The ice breakers have been lying idle; the crocuses flourished in February. There was no ice, even in the inlets of the jagged coastline, or in the archipelago. How times have changed. This is the British academic Arthur Reade writing of Finland in 1917:

When the sea is frozen the real joys of winter
begin. The ice becomes the scene of a vigorous life.
Roads marked by fir-trees are staked out on it be-
tween the town and the neighbouring islands, and
carts, cabs and automobiles make a lively trafific
upon them.. This is the ideal time for skating,
for then one is not confined to a rink but can range
at will among the bays and islands and enjoy a
delicious sense of freedom. Then, too, one may
see people practising the perilous art of
sailing on skates.
Even more delightful than skating, on account of
this very freedom, is ski-ing. he people of Helsingfors are very fond of
ski-ing over the frozen sea. There is something
most exhilarating in going forward across the vast
shining plain of snow and ice, with a cloudless sky
above one. Good ski-runners can go at a consider-
able pace across the level, and if they find it mo-
notonous can make for some of the numerous islands
for variety. But few things call up the sense of
infinity so strongly as leaving the islands behind
one and ski-ing across the open sea.”

Compare this to a comment in a Helsinki newspaper this winter: “All our winters are now going to resemble Belgium in November.” Anyone who has experienced Belgium in its so-called winter realises what a terrible future they face; at least they will still have the Northern lights.

Pragmatic as they are, Finnish companies are developing the world’s most advamnced biodiesel; and Wartsila, the engneering company, is a world leader in ships run on liquefied natural gas – ships are highly CO2 emitting. With the Northern Route opening up across the Siberian coast to Japan and China, the Finns are developing cargo-ship ice breakers, to deal with remaining ice cover. Several years running, the country has won Yale university’s awards for running an environemtally sustainable economy.
But its fate, in this sense, lies with larger, more polluting nations. Against global warming, advanced mobile phone technology is not going to be of much help.

Lord of the Rings ends on an elegiac note: the age of magic and elves has ended; those that remain “go across the sea” to the land of immortals. The age of prosaic men has begun. Here the game of facile comparisons peters out. The Finns are here to stay. Moreover, unlike the elves, who could hide from Middle Earth’s greatest travails, Finland must face them full on.

I have a suggestion. It’s based a little on a quid pro quo: not everything on the Finnish scene is bright. They haven’t won a Nobel prize in 40 years. Their 20 universities spread to ensure universal access divide resources. Timo Kekkonen, an economic adviser at the Finnish CBI, wishes that more foreign students, hi skilled tech workers, and foreign lecturers came. Finland needs more churn, suffers a labour shortage, needs more international stimulus of ideas across the board (there’smore to academe than engineering and technology). Finland needs more friends, and a bigger network: people who will say, oh, I lectured in Finland, why don’t you go and work there for a while. It needs to diversify/
So the suggestion is this: Finland ought to become the planet’s coordinating centre for global warming: just as Vienna in the cold war bagged the International Atomic Energy Agency, because of its strategic yet neutral location,, Helsinki ought to be awarded a similar body, close as it is (flying over the poles) to the Japan, China, the arctic itself, the rest of Europe, and, above all Russia, that closed country yet one which has a longer coastline than anyone else. Relations have improved since the Finns mined their latrines and saunas, and starved the invading Russians to death by shelling their troop kitchens in the winter war of 1940: as delicate interpreters of Russian intention for decades of the cold war, they can mediate between Russia and the arctic nations, loosely the West, at a time of difficult relations. Finland, with its talent for looking at the future, would keep larger nations focused on the long term role of dealing with the arctic: there are delicate issues of who owns what mineral resources under the ice. And in the long run, the world, let’s face it, is going to see massive population transfers to the Northern Regions..
Academics, policy makers, diplomats and environmental scientists wouldl all come through Helsinki giving Finland and its universities the international exposurer that they need. The climate will be warmer too, so the cold winters will be less unbearable. For foreigners, though, the 15 cases won’t go away.