Posts (page 2)

The Swedish government announced that universities will be able to charge tuition for non-EU students and offer student stipends from fall 2011.  Sweden has finally woken up and realized that college education is big business worldwide after having long viewed itself as a humanitarian (or socialist) haven.  During the past decade, tens of thousands of Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans, North Americans, British and Australians have poured into Sweden for a free college education.  In science and engineering, departments look like American colleges, with many immigrants. 

While good for internationalization, these students take their hard-won knowledge home, leaving Swedish taxpayers to foot the bill.  Although foreign students can work for Swedish companies if offered a job, most are forced to leave for financial reasons, so Sweden cannot capture the value of their free education.

Sweden faces serious budget problems and has been cutting back on welfare, health, and education, which does not play well with Swedish voters.  Elections are coming up next year.  The unemployment rate is 8% and forecast to jump to 12% by 2011, so the government needs to generate some revenues for its voters.

One coming challenge is a potential drop in foreign students, which Denmark experienced when it introduced tuition.  Although very good, most Swedish universities are not at the top in world rankings.  Quality is uneven due to closed faculty hiring policies and lax quality monitoring.  Universities will have raise their quality in order to compete with foreign universities. Already, JIBS.se where I work has launched new teaching and research quality programs, and opened hiring to foreign professors.  Other universities will have to do likewise if Sweden wants to attract top talent like U.S. and British universities.

College tuition for foreigners is part of the Moderate Party's shift to market-driven policies, which are partly inspired by Karl Rove, a past adviser to the government.  If the U.S. is going left, Sweden is going right.  

After nearly 2 years here, I'm returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-November to restart my life.  Before I leave, I'm focused on several areas:

- Branding the Jonkoping International Business School (www.jibs.se) at Stockholm business events
- Organizing a Space Commercialization project that will promote down-to-earth applications for space technologies from the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA
- Organizing a Sustainable Travel organization to plan a Stockholm conference in 2010
- Involving The Natural Step (www.thenaturalstep.org), a comprehensive sustainability methodology developed in Sweden and used to plan the 2010 Winnepeg Winter Olympics site and other regions
- Organizing a Sweden-Chile business innovation business tour by Chilean business people next year
- Launching a mobile learning venture (www.MobileAcademy.se) and online shop (www.MobileAcademy.info) in Sweden this fall, China/Asia this winter, and the U.S., Africa, and Latin America next spring.  My co-founding partners are all Swedish, but born in South Korea, Algeria and Spain, so we're a truly international team.  My goal is to connect with major Silicon Valley mobile players. 

Fall weather is already arriving and people are returning to work and school, so it's countdown time.  Contact me if you have any questions or interest in these areas.   Email:  info at dreamscapeglobal.com

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.  

Sweden's famed bank takeovers in the early 1990s have received lots of publicity, but now two of its big banks -- SwedBank and SEB -- are dragging down the economy because of bad loans to Baltic nations.  The kronor is likely to weak, loans will tighten, and unemployment will probably surpass the forecasted 11.3%.  
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/balt-j15.shtml

The "Swedish Dream" may be over.  Like other nations, Sweden faces the daunting task of rebuilding its banking system and economy, while cutting social, health and educational programs.  But that only reduces deficits.  To rebuild its finances, Sweden needs to increase revenues by expanding exports of its small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are weak in global marketing.  For export-shy SMEs, that will be no easy task indeed. 

The Christian Science Monitor just published an article arguing that Sweden is moving away from the "socialist nightmare" by privatizing many industry sectors, which has triggered a lively volley of comments.   

Sweden is taking the high ground with the upcoming launch of its 4G mobile network next year, which will put Stockholm into the lead -- a mobile Sputnik in the land of Social Democrats.  When will the U.S., German, South Korea, China and Japan catch up?  

I'm co-launching a mobile learning venture here that will offer corporate training, K-12 mobile courses, and women entrepreneur networking.  The mobile office and classroom will create lots of new business opportunities.  Already, handset makers like China's ZTE are entering Sweden to grow their market share and lure Nordic content and service providers for China's networks.  European and U.S. companies are likely to follow suit, so keep an eye on Stockholm.
http://networking.cbronline.com/news/ericsson_teliasonera_unveil_worlds_first_commercial_4glte_site_in_sweden_250509

Sweden faces a tough choice:  support manufacturing or diversify to service industries.  Although the government declined to bail out Volvo and Saab, its trade policies still favor "atoms" -- tangible goods that can be counted and exported.  The trade minister admits that Sweden doesn't track or promote "bits" -- intangible service industries.  

The recent sentencing of the Pirate Bay founders is likely to have broad impact on file sharing. There has been a major decline in Web traffic here, indicating the high level of pirated file sharing.  It will move file sharing to less-regulated regions and create opportunities for media creators.  Hollywood's latest movies may be protected more, but the ruling doesn't discourage the studios from flooding the Web with TV reruns and old movies to brand themselves.  Moreover, the decision will probably encourage more creative types of pirating.  
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345485,00.asp

Sweden is clamping down on the Internet, starting with government monitoring of all Internet traffic since January and now stopping peer-to-peer piracy.  While this stops illegal activity in the short term, increasing government control is likely to shift innovation offshore.  Sweden could become more of an IT backwater.  That would undercut its growing IT industry, one of the few sectors to offset its manufacturing decline.