Can Finland take Europe’s startup crown?
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If you build it, will the startups come? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novo Savo. Finland is building one of the biggest startup campuses in Europe, 13 football fields in size. It technically already exists in smaller form. It's called Maria01, and it's set to expand to accommodate more than 6,000 entrepreneurs. The goal is to build an ecosystem, as the BBC's Maddy Savage reports from Finland's capital, Helsinki.

Yellow diggers are shoring up mounds of earth as construction workers prepare to lay the foundations for three new buildings at Maria01, a non-profit hub for start-ups that opened in 2016 and is partly funded by local taxpayers. Sarete Runeberg is its CEO. Well, right now we are the largest start-up hub in the Nordics, but what we're actually aiming at becoming is that we'll be one of the very, very biggest ones in Europe, if not the biggest one.

So looking at the site now, what will we be able to see when this is finished? The whole place is really based on communities. So apart from actually offices, there's going to be a lot of event spaces, a lot of possibilities for people to meet each other and in that sense then also find different kinds of resources to grow their businesses.

Finland is a small country with a population of around 5.5 million, yet it's already spawned 12 unicorn startups, businesses worth a billion dollars or more. That includes several gaming companies and the food delivery platform Volt, which was acquired by its US rival DoorDash in 2022. Finland is committed to becoming a global leader as a startup and growth company ecosystem, and it was stated in the governmental programme two years ago.

Marjo Ilmari works for Business Finland, a government agency that promotes investment and innovation. She provides support and advice to entrepreneurs. Really, it's not just about rankings. The real goal there is to create an environment where our groundbreaking startups can emerge and really tackle the global challenges and also, meanwhile, drive growth in the Finnish economy. We'll be right back.

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One part of the agency's strategy is attracting more global tech talent by offering start-up visas and marketing the country's transparent business culture, abundant nature and free education.

But whether all this is enough for Finland to overtake Europe's more established startup hubs is up for debate. Well, I think we have in the international comparison, we have high taxes and low salaries. That's Mikael Pentikainen, CEO of the Federation of Finnish Enterprises, which lobbies for smaller businesses.

He says the government has recently lost support amongst entrepreneurs after raising a sales tax to try and stabilise public finances. It's now 25.5%, the highest rate in Western Europe. Plus... The general economic situation that we haven't had growth in the Finnish economy now for more than 10 years, that's of course causing difficulties for many entrepreneurs. Are you going to the events this week?

At Maria01's existing offices, some of the international founders are taking a break to play pool. There's also a sauna, a big Finnish tradition, and an ice swimming club. Most people I've met here are confident hubs like this one can help attract more founders and investments. But that might create new challenges. Jack Parker is a British founder who runs a health tech startup.

The advantage of the ecosystem right now is this kind of small town, everybody knows each other. So if I reach out to somebody, it's quite likely, maybe eight out of 10 times that they will respond. Scaling that up to a large scale, there is the risk of actually losing that element of it.

Another concern is the geopolitical rift between the US and Europe over how to tackle the war in Ukraine. Finland is on the border with Russia, and some fear investors and founders might place their bets elsewhere if tensions escalate further. That was the BBC's Maddy Savage reporting. I'm Nova Sapo and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.

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