How Sweden is failing its spacetechs – it's not about the budget, says one founder who moved his company to Finland

“The first thing [Business Finland] asks is how much export revenues can you bring in the next five years? How many people can you employ? Those were the only two questions they asked,” Saveda Suvanam says.

Finland is running their space program like a VC firm, not a standard federal agency. Here in the US, I'd say our federal support for innovation programs are pretty much second to none. NSF, NASA, DOD, NIH collectively provide billions in grant funding every year. However they function must closer to the Swedish model than the Finnish one. To get a NASA a grant, you don't need to have an active NASA partnership, but I'd say 95% of grantees do. Like Sweden, NASA has expectations of internal benefits from those funded innovations. And while our Small Business Innovation and Research programs are starting to shift towards a more pro-commercialization model, there is still intense due diligence and rigor in the assessment and review of each individual grant.

While it sounds like Sweden's barriers to entry are higher, it may be specifically because they host ESA astronauts and launch pads. Meanwhile, Finland is acting more like a conduit into ESA kind of like Ireland acting as a tax haven within the EU. If you lower the threshold of due diligence in Finlands case or in the Ireland case, benefit from taxes, you can attract companies that would otherwise not consider those countries. So in my mind, this is an example of a country (Finland) lowing the standards to the floor, which is inherently pro-business, rather than the case of a country (Sweden) not fostering it's commercial space community. With that in mind, this coming from the Financial Times rather than Wired makes sense.

The EU has a lot it can do, particularly providing funding, to foster commercial R&D. But this specific example doesn't seem to hold water. Europe needs additional resources for R&D and increased public/private partnerships, but the standards for those should still be quite high.