Sweden ranks at the top in R&D spending and IT competitiveness, but beyond its Top 100 corporations the country is very weak in global marketing. The standing joke here is that "going global" to Swedish businesses is selling to Holland and Germany. Few small Swedish businesses venture forth to Latin America, Africa, China or the Mideast; they would rather vacation in Thailand than risk exposing themselves to foreign risk. Unfortunately, sales at the Top 100 are plummeting and the Swedish government wants the smaller firms to fill in the gap, which could reach 15% of the total GDP this year.
To be fair, most small businesses worldwide stay home, but Sweden has such a tiny market (only 9.1 million people) that it doesn't have the luxury of sitting on its duff. The problem is that the government knows invests heavily in R&D, which is really full employment for researchers, but doesn't know how to get small firms to export. The Swedish Trade Council, like Swedish banks, focused on the bigger firms and now has a challenge trying to persuade smaller firms to export. Swedish agencies focus on financial input, but not performance out. Needless to say, Sweden has a lot of great little companies and technologies that go nowhere.
What's the solution to this commercialization dilemma? My suggestion is to bring in foreign marketing and sales experts who can take these companies into their home markets. Lots of consultants are trying to help small firms to "go global", but their efforts are limited since these firms have tiny or no foreign marketing budgets. And the Swedish Trade Council export managers actually compete with the consultants since they get 80% of their salary from consulting. Perhaps a little competition is good, but collaboration might work much faster, especially if Sweden used its vaunted IT capabilities to promote exports.
Like the Japanese, the Swedes are very systematic, but very slow in identifying, analyzing, discussing and solving problems. Perhaps this is a sign of aging societies. But both nations are living on their laurels. Unless they wake up and move faster, their economies will gradually sink as faster, younger, hungrier nations pass them up.
Despite the continuing bad economic news about Swedish manufacturing output declining 20% from last year, there is some good news: Sweden is the fifth most open trading nation.
http://www.swedishwire.com/business/480-sweden-among-the-best-trade-nations
Under the Moderate Party, the country is moving toward liberalizing industry sectors. While the U.S. is moving left, Sweden is moving right following the advice of U.S. neocon Karl Rove. Maybe the two nations will meet in the middle. But then Social Democrats would complain that Sweden is becoming too right-wing. It all comes down to how much government intervention the voters want. Healthcare and trade are the current acid tests of politics. There's no magic answer but all nations are moving toward government health coverage of some sort. The challenge is promoting open trade to generate the wealth to pay for it.
