Seems to me Norway has at least as good prerequisites to be innovative as the other Nordic countries or even Switzerland and the Netherlands. Why does Norway not rank higher?

38 comments

  1. Because oil had made people think we are rich and don’t need to innovate

    Because the manufacturing industry is a fraction of the size it once was. Without manufacturing there is fewer brains working in r&d

  2. Since one of the factors indexing innovation is infrastructure.. Must have in mind that norwegians live more spread around the country than they do in many other countries. It’s a purpose of the politicians to have people living on every hill and i every valley in norway.. Hence infrastructure is not that good because you spend a little bit on infrastructure everywhere instead of making some big things around some centres.. norway has always lagged behind in that matter.. when they some decades back in time had 100mbit in sweden.. if you were lucky.. you got 10mbit in norway.. Not to speak of the infrastructure one uses to move around… roads, trains, buses etc.. If you go way back in time.. they even debated whether norway were ready for color tv.. There’s much “old fashioned thinking” in norway.. In the “birth” of the mobilphone-era.. was said that norway even could make a “mobile industry”.. like sweden with ericcson and finland with nokia.. though never happened.. Hard to get people willing to invest their money in ideas (innovative things)..

  3. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

  4. Because we suck at developing industries. The oil sector sucked the field dry of the most talented people. We hardly even have prosessing facilities for the oil we pump up.
    Norway is often touted as a succes story, but there is always a hidden cost.

  5. Correct me if I am wrong but one of the more surprising things to me about Norway is how conservative minded it actually is. Across the board.

    I’m on the West Coast and everyone is very conservative and traditional.

    There also seems to be loads of followers and very few leaders.

  7. Norway has these things working against it:

    1. Few people.
    2. Small cities.
    3. Poor infrastructure.
    4. Oil industry sucking up talent.
    5. Very little private venture capital.
    6. Low salaries for innovative people.
    7. High tax burden.
    8. Law of Jante.
    9. Remote location.

    It is interesting to see how Sweden and Finland compares to Norway. Because those two countries are probably the most similar.

  8. The short answer is of course the resource curse. Life is good with oil.

    But the long answer is that the politicians are highly populist – not populist like in the US where they cater to rednecks who want guns but not abortions. Not populist like in India where the politicians cater to people on religion. No, here they are populist by being anti business and anti rich. You are penalised for accumulating wealth. CEOs etc earn about 4 to 10 times as much as the working class, and this is considered “skam” or shameful. If you have more wealth (savings or stocks) than debt, you pay tax on that.

    Sheep that work 8 to 3 and no more and take yearly package tour holidays in Spain are lauded as the norm.

    In addition there is always a fear that these politicians might suddenly raise taxes on high income, or start taxing property.

    In such an economic climate why would anyone innovate or work extra? Anyone who really wants to will move to a more conducive economy like Sweden, Denmark or Switzerland.

    Only the working class idiots or the salaried will remain behind.

    As far as manufacturing goes, Norway is ideal for this – a base of well educated workers, ample power, water and transportation. But again bad leadership has chased away this dream. Even though we produce electricity, it’s sold to the rest of Europe and then bought back for a higher price!! So manufacturing is just not attractive. Even the existing manufacturing is moving out of Norway.

  9. Our current government is very conservative by modern standard, and are basically stuck in the 90’s on a lot of questions. The liberal parties are generally either small and scattered across the economical political spectrum or not really that interested in fronting these ideas and compromise on them when they make coalitions with smaller, more conservative parties.

  10. If I had a billion dollar idea I would emigrate. There’s no fucking way I’d start a business in Norway.

    If I owned a profitable business, I’d expand into a lot more countries before Norway.

    A simple consequence of the heavy taxation in Norway.

  13. Many good points here, but I’d like to add one more: a strong welfare state and strong workers rights.

    I’m not advocating against a strong welfare state (quite the opposite, it’s one of the most important things we have), but like with everything else, it brings compromises. When you’re competing against other countries while simultaneously working less hours than most of the competition (and incentivizing working less), it makes sense that you’ll see significantly reduced outputs from your industry, including innovation and R&D. Norway is just to put it plain, to slow, expensive and small to really have a shot at competing on innovation indexes. If you want to do R&D and innovation work, there are other countries with better and more efficent environments.

  14. We have some extremly naiv and arrogant politician that have no idea how the world works. They kill innovation with huge company taxes. Lots of great innovative companies have fled the country to be able to out a product together at all.

  15. You should take this with a huge grain of salt if you haven’t read the entire research paper. this infographic doesn’t tell us anything about how this data was collected, who collected the data and what criteria they used to determine a countries “Innovation Index”. They don’t even tell us what “Innovation index” is. We also have no information on potential weaknesses of the research. The infographics also doesn’t tell us whether it’s based on absolute or relative values. I’m not saying the data is wrong, but remember to always be critical where you get your information from.

    As to why i think Norway didn’t score particularly well here, it might have something to do with the fact that Norway’s economy is relatively oil- and gass dependent. Maybe the study considered oil and gass not very innovative bussinesses? I also see “institutions” listed as one of the categories the scores are based on. I would assume “institutions” refers to universities? Norway doesn’t have any internationally renowned universities, which might mean it scores poorly in this category? As for infrastructure, Norway doesn’t have a large network of train tracks and highways. One reason for this is that the terrain makes them very expensive to build.

    I would think Norway scores very well in most aspects of an “Innovation index”, but maybe there are a few criteria that doesn’t favor Norway’s economy and bussinesses? Switzerland and Singapore are obvious tax havens, so that explains a lot of why they score well. I have also read several times of people regarding the US a tax haven.

  18. Real estate capture high interest (in double meaning).
    Lack of vision and support long term for business Venture.
    Weak ownership (see point above).
    Arrogant state/tax authorities.
    Intelligent SMEs owners understand they can’t fight this Environment, and do Sweden/Denmark startup instead.

  19. The cost of labour, the country scale (inhabitants), a monopolist economic set up, and too much state intervention might be some of the reasons imo.

  20. I’d be interested in how they measure innovation.

    I’ve seen similar reports on innovation where they ignore innovation in Oil & Gas coming out of large corporations.

  22. Unbalanced tax system that encourages certain types of saving before others. In Sweden one also has the ability to apply for reduced tax on foreign experts which means that 25% of the salary of that person will be exempt from tax. Something like that would never be implemented in Norway.

    A different commercial culture. We for instance don’t have business spheres like Sweden, or a high a degree of cross ownership like i.a. Sweden, Finland, Japan and Germany.

    We only have one good engineering university; Sweden has four. Sweden’s primary and secondary school education is probably the worst in the Nordic Countries, but their higher education is definetely the best. Also, the law schools in Norway have a one sided focus on certain aspects of private law, however the tax- and/or competition law consequenses of contracting is ignored which means that Norwegian lawyers have a big knowledge gap in that area.

    Sorry if my grammar is bad. I’ve had very little sleep.

  26. I want to see this graphed against the happiness index.

    Sure, innovation is great, but also soul-sucking in the US.

  27. Rich people are rarely very smart. They dont have to be its just a fact of life. People want to enjoy life!

    Nothing wrong here.

  29. Norway is not really an industrial country, it’s a country of explorers and farmers.

    Do that list but put explorers on it and it’ll change very quickly.

    Norway does have some tech related to ships and oil stuff that is world class.

  30. Controversial, but if you are talking about entrepreneurs, they are taxed more in Norway than foreign owners. Spotify, Electrolux in Sweden are things to aim for.

    But we live in an international world, people can move to London, Copenhagen etc with their skills.

    We have an innovative Oil and Gas sector. People don’t mind the international OG companies earning a lot of money, but absolutely detest people with faces. Much better they own a fund abroad and invest in Norway from abroad.

    We at least need to think about how we can innovate away from OG. Our brightest minds have tradionally gone there.

    Governments don’t create jobs tho and this government has been hostile towards people with assets.

    Hot take. FWIW

  31. You asked a question in your title, but your comments are full of your answers? What’s the point of this then? It feels more like a quiz..

  32. Because you’re all lazy and would rather go to nav for free money than work hard.

    Plus if you bust your ass to innovate, most of it gets taken in taxes. So why bother? When nav is free.

  34. Founder (Gründer) was basically a swear word in the 80s.

    If it’s not fish or oil no Norwegian investor is interrested.

    You are punished if you start a small company, everything is geared towards being a regular employee.

    Almost every company that does anything else than oil and fish is sold as soon as they reach the $100M mark.

    Investors and business owners are vilefied by media and political parties.

  35. The research paper makes clear this is a deeply questionable “index”. Includes a tonne of subjectivity, and is honestly pretty worthless

  36. The economy is driven and extremely dependent on oil, that’s why. If we hadn’t had oil, we’d probably be similar to Finland.

  38. [“The index has been criticized for giving excessive significance attributed to factors that aren’t integral to innovation. For instance, “Ease of Paying Taxes“, “Electricity Output“ (half-weightage) and “Ease of Protecting Minority Investors” are factors alongside “Ease of Getting Credit” and “Venture Capital Deals“”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index)

     

    This index can fuck right off and you with it, cloud-cunt.

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