The Entrepreneurship Revival: Reapplying Traditional Society and Cultural Paradigms to Create Change

European countries have marveled at the enormous entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. In an effort to "plug into" the Innovation Economy, they have tried and are currently trying to copy or import certain elements of this culture to the "old world." Sweden is a best practice example in this context, having turned its business environment into one of Europe's most entrepreneurial in just a few years . As this chapter indicates, creating entrepreneurship in Sweden has been a question of removing barriers and establishing role models. Its first focus describes how Swedish society paradigms were transformed in an unplanned manner, turning an environment that despised individual entrepreneurial initiative to one that honors it, practically overnight. This entrepreneurship revival was not a political initiative. It happened because entrepreneurship was a character trait of the Swedish people that lay suppressed for generations, revived by the imperatives of the global Innovation Economy. Entrepreneurship in Sweden has a different face than in the U.S. We will describe a Swedish-American cultural divergence , indicating that entrepreneurial cultures are global, but with regionally differing characteristics. We will also show how a pioneering Swedish company established a European presence based on the newly acquired entrepreneurship culture, and how it approached the heterogeneous European markets, benefiting from hype and booming venture capital markets.