For the roughly 7,000 startups based at the science parks and incubators which are members of Sisp, Lantz’s organisation, the unusually strong rights scientists and technologists have to the rights of their discoveries is one of strongest motivations to stay in Sweden. 

“One of the most important things for the companies we work with — these innovative, often research-based companies, is the ‘teachers exemption’,” Lantz told Paul O’Mahony, host of The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast. “It’s extremely unique: we are we’re the only country in the world that has this.” 

According to Lantz, the exemption, which allows researchers to retain full ownership of their work and build companies based on it, had been key to encouraging foreign-born academics to stay in Sweden to build companies on the back of discoveries made in the country.   

“This has fueled many research-based startups, and it makes it easier for them to attract investors from the get-go,” she said. 

In most other countries, she said, it was common for universities themselves to automatically receive stakes of between 20 percent to 50 percent in any company built on research carried out within them. That this was not the case in Sweden, she said, helped with funding. 

“It’s easier for a research-based startup to attract investors because it’s a bigger portion of the company that they could be invested in,” she said. 

A significant proportion of startups spun off from Sweden’s universities were led by foreign researchers, Lantz stressed.  

“A lot of startups and scaleups are led by or initiated by foreign workers, so foreign students, and in the startup ecosystem, you don’t really speak Swedish. English is the native tongue,” she said. 

“Asia is a big nationality. For example, India. But I would say also Latin America, America. Canada, the European countries, and also Africa, I would say it’s extremely broad.” 

Despite having less to gain from generating successful research spin-offs, she said, Swedish universities still did a good job providing good support structures for researchers wanting to make start-ups, with “fantastic” internal incubators. 

It was rarely the ‘teacher’s exemption’ that drew foreign researchers to Sweden in the first place, however, with Lantz saying many of the founders in her member incubators were drawn by soft factors. 

“I think many people choose Sweden because you have work-life balance, and maybe then you choose to stay in Sweden because you find love here: I think that’s also very common.”

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However, recent moves to restrict labour migration in Sweden, such as by raising the minimum salary threshold, were, she said, starting to make Sweden a less attractive company in which to start a business, both because the founders themselves faced more obstacles and because they found it more challenging to recruit from outside Sweden. 

“We are seriously worried. Because if you join a startup, for example, the normal thing is that you maybe have a very low salary for the first few years, especially if you join as a co-founder or if you’re founding a startup yourself,” she said. “You’re just taking as much salary as you need to to be able to afford to buy noodles. You don’t have any customers. You’re not there yet.” 

She said that this meant that many founders would be unable to pay themselves a sufficient salary to meet the current salary threshold (28,480 kronor a month, or 80 percent of median salary), let alone the median salary of 35,600 kronor, which is expected to become the threshold on June 1st next year. 

“Founders are a little bit scared to hire labour from outside Europe because the regulations are so tricky,” she said. “And this will only make it even even worse.” 

She said that Sisp and other business lobby organisations had been trying to get Sweden’s government to drop plans to further raise the salary threshold but appeared to be having little success.  

“The government is not really listening to this, because they want to achieve other things with this new recommendations and new regulations. I don’t think unfortunately, this government really sees startups as a separate group of companies and I think that’s something many other countries do differently.”