Finns freeze out Canada on technology

The Nordic countries still make me, as a Canadian, feel technologically embarrassed. It used to be Sweden that did it the most.

Then Norway. Now it's Finland. So similar in our physical and mental landscapes and yet so different in what our governments have wrung from technology.

Sweden, you'll remember, has less than a third of our population. Yet it can point with pride to two automobiles the world covets, Volvo and Saab, as well as a fighter jet to call its own. We did have the Arrow for a brief while, but now we just produce Yankee and Asian autos from branch plants. Norway, with half the population of Sweden, had drilling rigs tapping North Sea oil reserves long before any of us here could even spell Hibernia.

Finland, another population pipsqueak with five million people, is running away with something Canadians are supposed to be hotshots at: mobile communications.

Nokia and its cell phones are an economic blockbuster. Nokia revenues are in the billions and growing at 30 per cent annually. That surge of Nokia sales alone, economists say, kept Finland out of what might have been stagnation or even a mild recession last year.

No Nokia for us?

No focus. No hell-bent-for-election leadership from our government. Not like Finland's at any rate. Finland's recently re-elected Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen says Nokia's success is precisely what the Finnish government focused on achieving at the beginning of the decade. It wanted to escape the cyclical swings of demand for natural resources, specifically wood and paper (sound familiar?) and get firmly established with a best-- of-breed technology in the new economy.

So, coming out of the '80s, Finland boosted research and development spending significantly, slashed the national debt and came close to balancing its budget by 1991. Then taxes were cut to stimulate domestic demand and boost public confidence. By the mid-'90s, economic growth had soared to five per cent annually. Unemployment had tumbled from 15 to 10 per cent. Nokia had stopped producing rubber boots and tires, focused on phones instead, and was ready to take on the world.

If our government can learn this lesson of focus, where then should its esteemed leaders focusing their attentions? What technology should we support and what natural competitive advantage should we capitalize on?

Diversity is our advantage

We should focus on any technology that takes advantage of our multicultural nature. As syndicated columnist Gwyn Dyer told a hometown St. John's, audience recently, Canada is the only nation on earth where 20 per cent of the population is foreign-- born. Also, by official government decree, we encourage our newcomers to preserve the culture and language they landed with. As a result, says Dyer, Canadians are the only people who can phone a relative in every city in the world with a population greater than 50,000.

With such home-grown diversity and global connections at our disposal, who is better poised to develop and sell international call centres, multi-lingual software, speech recognition, automated translation and the like? With a little Finnish-style focus on related research and development spending in these fields, along with some confidence-building tax cuts, the government could encourage Canadian ingenuity to flourish.

Maybe then, we'd have something to brag about to our Nordic cousins - other than the snowmobile.

Andy Shaw is a contributing editor to

Technology in Government. Please

contact him at [email protected]

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jun 1999
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