Can New Zealand Learn from Finland?

There are several blogs I follow on a regular basis here in the region, one of them is Jim Donovan’s.

Jim posts pretty much daily and focuses on business management, mostly broadly but often with a strong slant in favor of what it will take to continue to build upon the economy in New Zealand.

His post this morning was a little left field in the context of his usual content, but thought provoking all the same.

His question was a simple one “Can NZ learn from Finland?”

While New Zealand’s dairy products giant Fonterra is globally successful in an industry where science and technology are key ingredients, there are probably only about 200 or so serious international businesses across all sectors in .the whole country. As Stuart Corson points out in the September issue of Boardroom (from the NZ Institute of Directors, and not online), selling services based on labour time (however smart) is not going to be a driver of high national economic productivity. Corson argues that New Zealand can learn a lot from Finland, a like-sized sparsely populated country with a strong rural base, and some strong cultural similarities. He’s a former forestry sector researcher who’s worked extensively with the Finns for over 30 years.

… he goes on to discuss a point that rings very true for me based upon the time I’ve spent with folks in NZ…

Corson puts the Finns’ success down to their bent for technology (they produce proportionately twice as many scientists and engineers as most countries in Europe), the preponderance of technologists in company leadership positions, and their appetite for risk and innovation in business investment. Aside from farming and its downstream industries, many NZ businesses could best be described as low entry cost (i.e. easy to get into). There are some very good technology and design-led businesses, but far too few at anything like international scale.

… on almost every trip there I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with people I would describe as real thought leaders in our industry, there is something in the culture of New Zealand that appears to build people who know how to get things done without much help or reliance on others, a rare trait in business today.