Despite its relatively small size, Estonia’s technology scene is one that hits well above its weight. The birthplace of Skype, the communication software tha would sell to retailer eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn before trading hands to tech giant Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5bn, the country has become intensively startup focused, producing more per head than any other EU country. In the few years Estonia has been outside the shadow of the Soviet Union, the country has transformed from a one where only half the population had a landline to a world leader in technology.
Much of Estonia’s success can be attributed to the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once the country regained its independence in 1991, it was left with a blank slate to work with in terms of infrastructure, which opened the door to upgrading instantly to digital technologies without having to clearout traditional methods of doing things. Without the burden of legacy technologies, the door to embracing the internet lay wide open.
In Estonia – or E-stonia, as it has become known – practically everything is done online. Car parking charges are paid via mobile phone. The Estonian governments cabinet meetings are all paperless, and utilise a tool called e-government to streamline the process. Citizens hold e-IDs that allow online and offline identification, facilitating seamless online access to 4,000 different services, including banking, voting, accessing medical records and ordering prescriptions, filing taxes, digital signatures, even fishing licences.
The country’s tech focus comes down from the top of government. The country’s former prime minister, Andrus Ansip, led the charge to go digital after the fall of the Iron Curtain, while President Toomas Hendrick Ilves, a former journalist, knows computer programming. The result has been a country where the main exports are startups, and everyone has free wifi.
However, in terms of technology transfer, Estonia does not have an awful lot to go on. The country has a small population of around 1.3m, and successive waves of Swedish, Russian, German and Soviet occupation – the country has been truly independent for around 45 years in the past 500 – has prevented the country from establishing an academic powerhouse. As such, the country has three main universities, Tartu, Tallinn, and the Tallinn University of Technology, as well as a number of specialised universities, mostly focused on the arts, and a handful of privately-owned institutions.
While Estonia may not have the research weight or academic resources of other countries in Europe, each of the three main universities maintain a well-developed tech transfer operation.
Tartu University is Estonia’s top-ranked, oldest and largest institution. Its tech transfer unit, Enterprise2, has seen success with probiotics and wearable medical monitoring technology, and holds a memorandum of understanding to work with University College London Business, UCL’s tech transfer office, in sharing innovations between the two universities. During 2012, it entered into co-operation agreements with 75 new companies, worth €2.4m ($3m).
Tallinn University, a mostly humanities-centric institution, focuses on knowledge transfer as opposed to directly licens–ing out technology or forming spin-outs. However, the nearby Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) has a thriving techtransfer office (TTO). Launched a few months ago as Mektory – short for Modern Estonian Knowledge Transfer Organisation for You – the TTO has yet to build a large catalogue of results, but is actively building its network. What is more, Mektory acts as an innovation gateway for students as well as faculty members, extending its involvement in and around the TUT campus.