With its fairytale fjords, magical northern lights and awe-inspiring nature, Norway is certainly a place that inspires innovation. Yet it’s struggling to scale its start-ups.
Norway is diversifying away from its roots as an oil and gas producer, and its engineering talent is instead joining or launching green energy start-ups. The country, notorious for its high-quality living standards, is also attracting foreign tech talent.
The country of almost 5.5 million inhabitants ranks 24th worldwide for its start-up ecosystem and 13th in Western Europe. It lags behind its neighbour Sweden but is slowly trying to catch up.
By Pascale Davies • Updated: 13/12/2022 – 18:22
With its fairytale fjords, magical northern lights and awe-inspiring nature, Norway is certainly a place that inspires innovation. Yet it’s struggling to scale its start-ups.
Norway is diversifying away from its roots as an oil and gas producer, and its engineering talent is instead joining or launching green energy start-ups. The country, notorious for its high-quality living standards, is also attracting foreign tech talent.
The country of almost 5.5 million inhabitants ranks 24th worldwide for its start-up ecosystem and 13th in Western Europe. It lags behind its neighbour Sweden but is slowly trying to catch up.
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Norway’s energy paradox: How oil and gas are at odds with green tech start-ups
As one of Norway’s six unicorns, start-ups with a valuation of more than €1 billion, the ed-tech company Kahoot! says Norway’s society and commercial structure has in the past been predominantly based on commodities, such as oil, natural gas and fisheries.
However, in the last 10-20 years there have been greater efforts to diversify the economy to generate new industries such as technology.
“The key ingredients in laying the foundation for a more diversified and entrepreneurial economy is an educated workforce, availability and deployment of relevant technology, access to capital and a reasonable regulatory framework,” says Kahoot! CEO Eilert Hanoa.
“We have seen progress in all of these areas, although there is still a lot of work to be done,” he told Euronews Next.
The investment setback
One of Norway’s biggest setbacks is access to investment, which may become all the more difficult with the current economic uncertainty.
“For the Norwegian start-up scene as a whole, obviously the immediate impact is access to capital, which is potentially harder for many now. Also, the rising labour cost and general inflation add to the burden for some,” Hanoa said.
“Mobility of talent is probably slightly contracted now after a frenzy period where talent retention was quite hard and many were looking for new career opportunities elsewhere. So I’d say it’s probably a mixed picture”.
But on a more positive note, he said if you have a start-up that has a strong idea, team and execution, it “is still fully possible to develop well, even during tough times”.
