HOW FINNS FIXED THINGS
Think small, Finland did. That’s how it made it big.
Finland gave Quezon City a book this week containing 100 Finnish innovations.
What a way for a country of 5.6 million people to explain itself.
Consider the dish rack.
In the 1940s, Maiju Gebhard looked at the daily business of washing a plate, drying it with a towel, then putting it in a cupboard, one chore too many she decided was idiotic.
She developed the dish-drying cabinet: racks above the sink where wet dishes drip dry while you go do something else with your life.
Arvi Lehti confronted a nastier problem. Pedestrians were being hit on Finland’s dark country roads. The farmer developed a reflector people could wear so drivers could see them.
A Finnish company, Polar, made the first wireless wearable heart-rate monitor. Before that, checking your heart rate while exercising meant stopping and counting your pulse. The fitness watch on your arm today comes from Polar’s basic idea.
In 1991, Helsinki student Linus Torvalds began the project that became Linux, the operating-system kernel now buried inside most machineries that run the bloody world.
Finland is small enough to notice little problems and smart enough not to call them little. That’s how small countries get big.
This is what Finnish Ambassador Saija Nurminen brought to Mayor Joy Belmonte on 8 September, translated into Filipino as 100 Inobasyon mula sa Finland and bound for Quezon City’s public libraries.
It’s an odd because most countries tell you what they believe. Finland brought a book about what pissed them off enough to fix.