Friction

Research and delivery proposals

What Nordification has been working to do for decades

What is Nordification?

Nordification combines a firm, even fierce, concept of building a strong internal economy with looking outward to the rest of the world.

Adapting to the climate and weather changes you over the centuries. You realise that some things need to be prepared for and accepted. There is no such thing as bad weather for such peoples. Just bad clothes.

But that doesn’t stop you from striking out. And maybe it’s what leads you to strike out.

Sweden was the third most innovative country in the world for patents registered in 2022, with only 10 million inhabitants, and only beaten to the pole position by Switzerland and the US. And in the same year, there were more than 10,000 funded startups in the Greater Stockholm region alone.

Just over 2 million people. More than 10,000 startups. Per head of population, where does that leave Silicon Valley? Standing, I would suggest.

Is there anything else?

Yes. There’s more.

Socioeconomically, people who live in countries like Sweden, alongside the wider Nordics, sense, with a second sight they often don’t realise they have, that the individual can only be healthy if the society in which the individual operates is also healthy. And vice versa.

So that’s how they usually strive to do business. The Nordic way, Nordification, doesn’t limit itself to what we might term “lifestyle-innovation” startup, where problems are simplified to their minimum exponent so someone can persuade a new client to pay the invoice ASAP. Nordification is also about an intuitive and complex approach to analysing problems as holistic systems, before looking to solve them.

The problem with the elevator pitch: it’s the problem you’re not solving

Mostly, in the US and the UK, as well as in other primarily English-speaking countries, we believe if you cannot say something in an elevator pitch, it’s not worth investing money into. But what if compressing a problem into twenty simplifying seconds means you lose sight of the problem? What if you can never solve it by simplifying it? What if you need to assess the whole system in its entirety in order to address its parts?

This is what Nordification does, over and over again. And not just the procedures and processes, the tactics and strategies, the machines and their necessary, even desirable, automation.

And then there’s you and me

There’s the human, too. Not as an afterthought. As an integral element of everything the Nordics do. From the start of the innovation process.

Only they don’t see this as notable, nor act as if it were an afterthought. They see it as a given. It doesn’t seem special to them.

What about tech in the rest of the world?

And the rest of us? We accept Silicon Valley’s grift as inevitable, necessary, even beneficial. A quid pro quo. No gain without pain.

What we never do is ask this question: what if tech considered humans and machines as equal and complementary partners in the different things each are naturally good at, and made it possible for both to enhance and expand virtuously the other? What if society and tech had the prime goal of making life better for citizens and businesses in similar measure, using machines and related as extensions of humans, not as extensions of the egos of CEOs who do know better?

What if we ALL practised Nordification?

The assumptions the Nordic peoples make without realising they’re making them.

Transported to societies where quick turnaround, getting away with alpha as if beta and beta as if finished product, selling standardised as bespoke, and prioritising the wealth and pockets of a hugely toxic elite are currently what the UK, US and similar think should be seen as Good Tech.

Except it’s not good. It’s actually really toxic tech.

What if there were another way?

What if that way could be Nordification?