01/01/2026
Excerpts from today’s Sanomat editorial:
🚀 Growth companies are a major opportunity for Finland’s economy, but seizing it requires a new way of thinking.
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Finland needs growth. Looking backward from the present, the curve over the past 18 years has been almost a straight line—not a growth curve but a flat line. This cannot continue. Startup companies seem to offer the only sector where rapid growth can be found in the coming years.
In November, the first extensive report on Finland’s startup ecosystem was published. According to it, Finland currently has around 4,200 startup companies with combined revenues of €12.5 billion. Together they employ nearly 50,000 people. More than 300 new companies are founded each year, about a hundred of them around Aalto University.
The pace is good—but it could be better. In Sweden, the combined value of growth companies has been estimated at around €239 billion. The country has managed to produce as many as 40 unicorns—growth companies valued at over one billion euros.
The pace of digital markets is so fast that companies and individuals operating in them must follow a completely different logic than in other sectors. Two newly published books by successful startup entrepreneurs aim to instill this mindset and attitude in Finns.
*The Startup Handbook* is a light but substantive guide aimed especially at young people, written by two entrepreneurs and investors, Timo Ahopelto and Jyri Engeström. Mårten Mickos, who has succeeded as CEO of several growth companies, has distilled his lessons into the book *The Growth Formula*, which offers ideas not only for entrepreneurs but also for economic policymakers.
Mickos explains what growth companies need from society: flexible labor markets, research and development, work-based immigration, encouraging taxation, and sufficient funding—largely the same things entrepreneurship needs in general. There is, however, one important difference: subsidies that prop up old structures do more harm than good.
The authors of *The Startup Handbook* want to grow a new generation of startup entrepreneurs in Finland, so the book is offered free as an e-version to third-year upper secondary students. However, in cities such as Helsinki and Vantaa it was decided not to distribute the link via Wilma, because Wilma is not intended for that purpose. A good example of the obstacles startup thinking must overcome in Finland.
Hopefully, they will be overcome. Ahopelto and Engeström predict that over the next six years Finland will catch up with Sweden and produce 10–15 new unicorns—companies valued at over one billion euros. If that happens, Finland’s outlook in the early 2030s will be far brighter than we currently dare to imagine.
The whole editorial in Finnish: https://lnkd.in/d8HsyM7h
Translation provided by Ahopelto
