Why does Norway have the highest entrepreneur rate in the world?

[Asher]

What the **** does that have to do with everything? Alberta has far more players than Norway does, that has **** all to do with entrepreneurship rate. The marketshare of a single large corp vs the marketshare of many other corps doesn't impact that.

[Kitschum]

The EU innovation scoreboard came out about a week ago and although it's far from the same as what is measured with entrepreneurial rate it gives a slightly different picture for Norway.



Clickable map on the link:

http://www.proinno-europe.eu/inno-metrics/page/innovation-union-scoreboard-2010

Take notice of Norway's (NO) "exceptional" position in the middle compared to the other Nordic countries (FI DK SE) at the right. DE is Germany and CH is Switzerland, by the way.




Looking at Norway's metrics in detail some are rather surprising. In this graph 100 = the EU27 average. Youth with upper secondary level education is below average for one, but the most surprising to me is Norway's rather poor performance in trademarks and patents.

True, this scoreboard is almost certainly EU-centric and somewhat arbitrary but then how do we explain Switzerland's outstanding performance? Is Norway just poor at exploiting her intellectual property or is she really lagging behind? This seems to indicate that resource extraction (i.e. oil), is crowding out innovative, and perhaps manufacturing, sectors.




Switzerland's metrics for comparison.

[Nikolai]

1) Oil in Norway is state-owned.
2) Quebec, despite having higher taxes than most Canadian provinces, is within the average for the number of SMEs.

Well, more like semi-state owned. The state has ca 70% of the stocks in Statoil IIRC. That's the biggest producer of oil in Norway.