The world is significantly different compared to when I entered the work force in the 90’s
We now live inside a mixed bag of contradictions and opposing forces. The slow fade of the 3 or 4 manufacturing giants, diluted qualification value, emergent technologies opening up exciting new possibilities, together with a social structure that seems to prevent people from actually getting out there and taking advantage of these new technologies.
High preforming, innovative and financial resilient countries are without fail, countries that foster and actively help their young talent to start enterprises and generally have economies with high levels of SME’s. (small and medium sized enterprises) Finland is not one of those countries. At least not yet.
Compared to my time, a young person coming of work age now has less opportunities to get a decent start at young age than I did. And compared to my time, we have a lot less individual and independent businesses that offered better services. Here we are increasingly surrounded by depressingly small number of national chains that are lazily copy/pasted from town to town. Big manufacturing is still dominated by the likes of UPM, Kone and Nokia but they are slowly fading which leave us with a big talent surplus. People who, after retraining will be too old to be seriously considered in the job market and young graduates entering the same market to find nothing available within their field of study.
And so, in the face of this problem, recent advice from employment services is to start your own business. If only it was that easy.
Let us get one thing straight before we dig in any deeper. When people say phrases like ‘people always have the choice of X or Y.’ But when Y means becoming homeless or risking starvation of you and your family, then there is no actual choice. This bad faith argument is often regurgitated ad-nauseum when discussions about helping start-ups and young entrepreneurs.
I have been talking a lot to young entrepreurs and about their journey and I rarely walked away feeling positive. Most seem to fall into 3 different boxes. 1. They are forced to live at home and live off their parents. 2. They have a well-paid partner to support them or 3. They are already wealthy. If one of those boxes was not ticked, then the chances are very high that they did not start or they failed. I have not heard of a single instance where it was state support that was the key to getting their business idea off the ground.
There are many instruments that Business Finland and ELY have for growth and international expansion. But those grants are for businesses that already have good turn over and are out of that initial start-up phase. Essentially its easy money going towards money. Even at a municipal level, the incubators and start up services provided by Jyväskylä only support those who already have a running self-supporting business. What is the point?
This does not need to be like the ‘Hunger Games’
To be fair there is a single grant for people at the bottom wishing to start a business. Starttiraha is the only option if you are poor, have no prospects and have no access to any capital. It is a laughable amount and is really of no use to anyone. It would not encourage anyone to make that brave leap into the unknown. Also, by accepting this grant you are automatically cut off from some of the benefits of the bigger grants that exist higher up the funding ladder.
There is no reasonable justification to make this process so difficult at the start. This does not need to be the ‘Hunger Games’ of kill or be killed, especially when the result is a business that contribute good taxes to the public purse.
Perhaps there is still a resentful stigma to business owners, an unfair link being drawn from the CEO of a tax dodging multinational to a struggling single person company or a small café in the city centre. Whatever it is, it has manifested itself in a rigid system that only allows wealthy people to be business owners and everyone else consigned to the unemployment queue or a life of potential endless, pointless study.
how much effort and political capital are you willing expend to achieve this.
As of writing we have a left leaning government and yet their inaction on this issue either confirms this backwards resentment or the support of the status quo in favour of the rich. Which I find very depressing.
The trend is tilting towards more SME’s which I applaud, and yet no support is being prepared for this new future. Imagine how many innovations might actually be born in Finland if we redirect some of the wasteful subsidies from multinationals to a ground level start-up fund? Yes, make the criteria tough, but don’t make it so a person has to risk destitution to reach that criteria.
The question we have to ask ourselves is how we build this country into a stable rock just like Germany, less reliant on a handful of companies and more importantly, how much effort and political capital are you willing expend to achieve this.
We owe our youth and our weaker in society and our future economy more than what we are doing right now.