How does Sweden become a global contender on the entrepreneur stage?

To begin, let’s picture Sweden as the most successful country in the world in entrepreneurship. Imagine the prosperity, because money creates possibilities. Think more jobs, a higher standard of living, better welfare systems… basically Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I have two ideas on how to solve this, but let’s first look at where we are today and how we got here.

The long and short of it, Sweden’s roots are in trade. We flourished during early industrialism and went on to found huge global companies, an amazing feat for being such a relatively small country. For some 70 years we have lived prosperously. The downside of this, however, is our big organizations with, in some cases, destructive corporate cultures. To put it mildly, some are just too fat and lazy. What’s more, media tends to focus on these companies’ order books as if they are largely controlled by external circumstances such as the economy. This is partly true, but we’re missing a larger issue here: selling.

Eight years ago, after returning to Sweden from my studies in America, I had no idea where my future career would lead. Most of my friends went into popular traineeships or started at the bottom of major consulting firms. Working in sales at the time was not something to aspire to, at least this is what Swedish society and schooling taught me, so I figured I’d work in purchasing, a job with much more status, they said. But this was too dull for me, certainly nothing I felt passionate about, so I went my own way and landed a job (only commission based though) with a PR agency. I luckily met Fredrik Båge here, my future partner in Mediapilot, who told me straight away that I would be great at sales and with his encouragement I stuck with the job and later founded Mediapilot. In seven years we have created 100+ jobs, none of which would exist had I taken the safe route and not started my own company. Are there more people out there like me? Absolutely.

So, how to turn Sweden into a global contender on the entrepreneur stage? First, start with the vision and leadership to reach this goal. We need a leading politician to embrace this change and set a goal to reach it by, say, 2025. We also need to create one of the most innovative and inspiring schools in the world.

Our leaders, their vision and initiatives

· We lack leadership and need leading politicians to take this role and set the vision.

· I recently read a post from leading entrepreneur Johan Stael von Holstein asking if anyone in his network has sat down for a one-on-one with our prime and/or finance minister. No one said yes. The top management of our country must take ownership in this matter and show the way.

· The government needs to hire people with a background in corporate life and preferably successful entrepreneurs.

· Create a group whose prime reasonability is to analyze and create a plan for how to reach the goal of number one in the world. This group would ideally consist of people from the aforementioned background. This group would also be responsible for carrying out this plan and reporting directly to the prime minister.

Bet on the teachers

Salaries and status must be improved and why not take this initiative from the government by increasing the budget. The best teacher I had was in the US, 50 or so years old with experience from corporate life, entrepreneurship and had a PhD in business. I believe most of the teachers I had in the four universities I attended in Sweden had 95% of their experience in theory and basically no practical background. Tough platform to teach entrepreneurship from.

Less theory and more learning by doing

I gained a broad education from my five years at university, but there is very little of this that I can actually make use of today. Plus, back then the book by Philiip Kottler was obsolete. Just a couple of ideas to make this happen, all across the line:

· Mandatory internship annually from the age of 13

· More case studies and less exams aimed at reciting 1,000 pages of corporate nonsense

· Annual mandatory real case start up from first high school year

· Add debate class, problem solving, presentation practice, sales and communication to all types of programs

· Allow private universities: copy paste the Norwegian University BI, which will be their only hope when Norway’s oil runs dry (sorry Norway). I’d be happy to join in this venture, but who wouldn’t be?

Our merchant, trading and win-win mentality has been diluted during our time of prosperity and we now need to reinvent to stay on top. It’s time to go back to basics. Let’s do what we do best: business. When starting your own company you will quickly notice that if you want business you have to go out there and get it. Sweden’s start up scene is red hot at the moment. It’s time for the politicians to take the lead and show the way. Left or right doesn’t matter to me; we just need someone to take this on.