AVANTO - Conversations on Finland’s Global Competitiveness

Jarmo Sareva is the Consul General of Finland in New York and former Ambassador for Innovation. From New York — the city where global capital decides what to look at and what to overlook — he describes how Finland is read from the outside, and what that view reveals about the country itself.Reputation is real, but limited. Finnish modesty has a cost in the global market. Reliability is a virtue at home and a liability abroad. Finland is now behind Estonia in per capita exports. The reasons, in Jarmo's words, are multifaceted: cultural, structural, and "between the ears of so many people."Episode 5 of AVANTO. Following Pauli Heikkilä, Mikko Suonenlahti, Johannes Korpela and Petri Lahesmaa.

Most people assume Brussels is a closed system. That the big countries set the rules, and everyone else follows.Petri Lahesmaa has spent more than 25 years inside those institutions. And his view is different.Small countries can move faster. Alliances matter more than size. And the door is open — if you walk through it with data, with solutions, and with something to show.The problem is that Finland doesn't always walk through it.In this conversation, we talk about how power actually works in Brussels, what Finland gets right, what it gets wrong, and what it would take for Finland to stop hiding what it has.

Johannes Korpela sees it every day. The talent is there. The founders are there. The ambition is there.But if you work as hard as a top athlete to build a company, it isn't always recognized.He is CEO of Wave Ventures and co-founder of Founders House Helsinki. He spends his days with founders trying to build global companies — and sees how things actuallyplay out in practice. Not in theory. On the ground.And what he sees is not a lack of ambition — but an environment that doesn't always fully support it.

In Episode 1, Pauli Heikkilä argued that Finland’s difficulty building globally dominant companies may be largely cultural.In this second conversation, venture capitalist Mikko Suonenlahti offers a different perspective.After five decades inside companies, venture funds and boardrooms, his diagnosis is more structural.Finland produces excellent engineers. Early-stage capital exists.But the system starts to break when companies try to scale.“When companies need a €10–20–50 million round, that capital is not available in Finland.”We discuss what happens at that moment, how capital shapes strategy, how companies evolve when international investors enter, and why some ecosystems scale more aggressively than others.The conversation moves from venture capital to boardroom dynamics, from M-Files to Estonia’s ecosystem, and even back to the 17th century, to understand how capital accumulation shaped Nordic economies.

In this first episode of AVANTO, a podcast on Finland’s global competitiveness, Geoffroy Van Humbeeck speaks with Pauli Heikkilä, former CEO of Finnvera — Finland’s national promotional bank and export credit agency.Drawing on more than two decades at the heart of Finland’s innovation and financing ecosystem, Heikkilä reflects on the structural and cultural factors that shape how Finnish companies grow — and why strong technical excellence has not always translated into global influence.The conversation explores:Why engineering strength alone is not enough for Finnish companies to scaleThe persistent undervaluation of sales and marketing in FinlandHow historical attitudes toward risk still influence Finnish business cultureWhy Finland needs more €100 million and €1 billion companiesAnd what must change if Finland wants to shape global markets, not just participate in themAVANTO is a long-form conversation series examining ambition, capital and global competitiveness in Finland.