Finland's Tech Boom

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Finland may only have a population of just over five million but it is a technological giant. For many years the highly successful company, Nokia, ruled the world of mobile phones, and was a deep source of national pride. Nokia may have been knocked off the podium from its primary position but Finnish people have not fallen into a depression. Instead, it has led to a boom in creativity and spawned hundreds of start-up companies, some of them founded by former employees of Nokia, financially supported by that company through its bridging scheme. In a special edition of Click, Gareth Mitchell travels to Helsinki to report on the rise, fall and rise again of the tech industry. Finland is also home to some of the world’s top video game companies that have given us Angry Birds, and more recently, Supercell’s Clash of Clans. It is also the host of the Millennium Technology Prize (which has been called a Nobel Prize for technology); and a month long celebration of technological innovation organised by the Technology Academy Finland. All of which suggests that technology is once again at the centre of Finnish society. (Photo: Gareth Mitchell (centre) with Tero Heinonen and Petri Rauhakallio from Sharper Shape, standing in front of a UAV drone for future work in forests © BBC)