“Activity breeds innovation,” Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland told an eager panel. “New things are not created without taking risks.” And never has there seemed a more urgent need for new ideas than now, with the world’s economies still reverberating from the worst slump in generations and public debts expanding almost beyond control. The key to a sustainable recovery will be entrepreneurship and innovation, he said, and in Finland, “it is in times of crisis when governments have to be particularly active” in promoting them. Finland’s experience, he continued, shows that extraordinary difficulties can be overcome with the right policies and enterprise; so too for the rest of the world, “in the coming years governments will play a bigger role than before.”
GCLS UPDATE: A Celebration of Innovation
