30th of september Epicenter hosted Scale-up Summit Oslo as part of this year’s Oslo Innovation week. We invited some inspiring and insightful speakers to share their knowledge on how companies can succeed with today’s major scale-up challenges.

Sondre Jahr Nygaard is Head of Innovation and Business Development at Abelia. His main focus is to improve the frameworks and the overall conditions for Norwegian startups and scaleups. Sondre is above average interested in politics within education and research, and wrote a master’s degree about technology, innovation and knowledge from the University in Oslo.

Political changes: scale-ups experience many boundaries they cannot solve themselves. In what way can politicians make it easier for scale-ups to focus on growing their company, not on paperwork? And how can entrepreneurs help influence political change? 

Sondre Nygaard shared his knowledge of the future of Norway’s economy and how we need to meet the challenges that we face.  

“ To meet the challenges of tomorrow we need more scale-ups, and we must do it by doing three things. We need better access to talent, better access to capital, and they need help from the public sector” – Nygaard says. 

Politicians can help make life easier for scale-ups, such as attracting top talent from foreign countries to Norway by implementing regulations to make the process of talent getting into Norway much easier. When it comes to capital, Nygaard points out that we need to lower the risk for private investors to invest in companies at the earliest stages. 

“ We need incentives and regulations to stimulate more investment in more Norwegian businesses by tax credits. We need tax incentives to make that happen” – Nygaards says.  

Nygaards advice to how entrepreneurs can help making a difference is to not be afraid to make direct contact with the politicians.  

“ In my experience when working with politicians over time is that they are very easy to get access to. If you have an issue regarding regulations they are always keen to hear your concern”.  

Want to check out the rest of the summit? Follow the links below:

Svein Sørensen, Talented: Talent attraction
Tale Skjølsvik, OsloMet: Talent development
Thomas Wrede-Holm, Investinor: Smart investments
Klara Vatn, Spacemaker.ai: Scale-up growing pains