The Nordic region has been in the limelight for a few weeks now especially with the horrific massacre in Norway that the gunman confessed he trained for in a video game, their move to make mobile phones function as transport tickets, Finland’s game development booming, etc., etc.  But what analysts are focusing more on is Norway, as how it is not as competitive as the countries surrounding it though it is quite a wealthy country.

In a recent study, Tor R. Grønsund, co-founder of Waffle Labs, a lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the University of Oslo, and the writer of the Methodologist blog, has found seven symptoms of the Norwegian startup ecosystem that might explain why Norway is lagging behind other countries on tech innovation.

Black Gold:  Norwegian researchers developed the object-oriented programming language back in 1960, which was later used for creating Java and many of today’s popular web application frameworks but software is not the primary focus of Norway as oil and petroleum is still their primary focus.

Going “public”: They love their own.  They don’t see the point of hiring from different countries because they believe that they have the brains and the resources for anything.

The Jante Law: You can perform well as long as you keep quiet about it, simply put, whatever you learned abroad if you studied in foreign countries, just keep it to yourself, no need to share your knowledge.

Nature vs. nurture: Though entrepreneurship is becoming big in Norway as degrees on it are being offered in top universities in the country, it is not being practiced as they rely more on  internship programmes with startups in San Francisco, Boston, Houston, Singapore, London, and Shanghai.

The 4th branch of government: This is actually the media.  Their tech publications focuses on oil and energy and rarely, almost never of software technology and people are greatly influenced by their media.  so what they say mostly is what goes.

Deep pockets: Sales taxes in Norway are about triple and Payroll taxes are double those in the U.S. so it is not ideal to start a business here.

Beating the fat tail: The government is responsible for deciding who will be able to their company there and they favor more of those who want to invest or improve their oil and energy industry.

It seems like Norway is more of a closed-country than an open one as they are more focused on what they have and they don’t give as much attention to tech development and what they can offer others as their neighbors are.  There’s actually nothing wrong with this, but I think what most people are thinking is that they have great resources, especially people, and with a closed-door-like-policy, it’s just a shame that the world isn’t benefiting from them.

Perhaps it’s time for the Startup Sauna to make its way into Norway and try to melt the ice from the development fjords to bring their mighty prowess to bear.