A few years ago, I was struck by a photo in Arab News, Saudi Arabia\u2019s largest English-language newspaper. The article was about entrepreneurship\u2014nothing remarkable in itself. But in the photo, I saw six Saudi female entrepreneurs, three of them with their hair uncovered, and their names listed in the caption. Ten years earlier, the same newspaper had published neither their names nor a photo of them. When I first arrived in Riyadh in 2017, the religious police were still patrolling the streets, women were not allowed to drive, and restaurants were gender-segregated. <\/p>\n\n
The prevailing image of Saudi Arabia in Sweden is often a snapshot from several decades ago. Over the past decade, the country has changed. Women\u2019s labor force participation has more than doubled in seven years, from 17 to nearly 40 percent\u2014a journey that took Sweden several decades to achieve. Two-thirds of the population is under 30 years old. And in July 2025, Ericsson opened a new regional headquarters for the Middle East and Africa in Riyadh. In the Swedish business press, this was treated mostly as a curiosity. It was significantly more than that. It was a strong signal that Saudi Arabia\u2019s reform project is entering a phase where productivity, innovation, and business development are becoming more important. And here, Sweden has relevant experience to contribute. <\/p>\n\n
\nThe prevailing image of Saudi Arabia in Sweden is often a snapshot from several decades ago.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
After several years as an advisor to the Saudi Ministry of Labor, and subsequently continuing to work in the country, I have followed the transformation up close. My point here is not that this transformation is without problems\u2014Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, and the unresolved issues regarding the rule of law and human rights deserve to be taken seriously. My point is that the transformation is now entering a new phase\u2014and that this phase involves what Swedish research and Swedish business excel at. <\/p>\n\n
The next phase must focus on productivity<\/h2>\n\n
If you break down Saudi Arabia\u2019s growth over the past decade, you can see that a large part of it comes from mobilization: more people and more capital have been put to work. Total factor productivity\u2014the ability to get more out of the same people and machines\u2014has been close to zero. This is not a failure; it is simply what the early stages of successful transformations look like. But mobilization has its limits. If Vision 2030 (see footnote) was largely a vision of mobilization, the next vision\u2014the one internally outlined as Vision 2040\u2014must be one of productivity. And productivity is fundamentally not just a matter of money but of institutions: secure property rights, deep capital markets, competition; and the freedom for new companies to challenge\u2014and displace\u2014old ones. Innovation and entrepreneurship will be crucial here. <\/p>\n\n
Here, Sweden has something unusual to offer: not a model to copy, but the experiences of a country that fell into a productivity trap and managed to escape it. By the end of the 1980s, Swedish productivity growth had stagnated after two decades of decline. In 1991, the Productivity Commission, led by Klas Eklund, identified what was missing: pressure for transformation\u2014the discipline of competition and openness that forces capital and labor to shift toward more productive uses. Then came the crisis, and Sweden took the tough steps: tax reform, deregulation, EU membership, fiscal rules, and pension reform. A decade later, productivity began to grow again, exports rose from one-third to one-half of GDP, and from this emerged a venture capital and startup ecosystem that has made Sweden perhaps Europe\u2019s leading tech hub per capita. <\/p>\n\n
Here is a concrete opportunity in Sweden<\/h2>\n\n
It is precisely that knowledge and those experiences\u2014how to build momentum for transformation, entrepreneurial ecosystems, pension-based venture capital, and the dissemination of technology and leadership from established companies\u2014that Saudi Arabia now needs to import. And the demand is there. Saudi technocrats are already studying the Nordic model; several of them made the Nordic case to me before I had a chance to make it to them. Furthermore, in my experience, culturally speaking, a Saudi business meeting is often closer to a Swedish boardroom than an American one: people listen and build consensus. <\/p>\n\n
\nThe door is open. The question is whether Sweden intends to walk through it\u2014or let others do so first. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
That is why my call to action is threefold. To Swedish researchers in entrepreneurship and innovation: get involved. Few countries currently offer a more interesting natural experiment in how entrepreneurial ecosystems are built\u2014or fail to be built\u2014than Saudi Arabia, and your expertise is in high demand. To Swedish entrepreneurs and high-growth companies: go there, but do your homework. The market is large, young, digital, and has strong purchasing power, and Swedish solutions in everything from fintech and healthtech to education and energy are exceptionally well-suited to its needs. And to Swedish policymakers: approach the relationship strategically, as Denmark and Finland have already begun to do. Build research partnerships, strengthen trade promotion, and establish institutional exchanges instead of letting thirty-year-old stereotypes dictate policy. <\/p>\n\n
I am not a neutral observer. I myself work to help foreign companies establish themselves in Saudi Arabia and therefore have a personal commercial interest in the matter. Readers are welcome to take this into account. But don\u2019t discount the facts: one of the world\u2019s most talked-about transformation projects is now entering the phase where Swedish research, Swedish institutions, and Swedish entrepreneurship are most relevant. That door is open. The question is whether Sweden intends to walk through it\u2014or let others do so first. <\/p>\n\n
Sven Otto Littorin<\/strong>Former Minister of Labor (2006\u20132010), advisor to the Saudi Ministry of Labor (2017\u20132021), and author of the book *Kingdom in Motion \u2013 A Personal Account from Inside Saudi Arabia\u2019s Revolution*<\/em> (2026).<\/p>\n\nFootnote<\/strong>Saudi Arabia\u2019s national reform program, Vision 2030, was launched in 2016 under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Through economic diversification and a strengthened role for the private sector, women, and young people, the program aims to reduce the country\u2019s dependence on oil revenues. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t miss out on the opportunities presented by Saudi Arabia\u2019s reforms. That is the message Sven Otto Littorin wants to convey to researchers, entrepreneurs, and other decision-makers. Over the past ten years, he has closely followed developments there and believes that the lessons Sweden has learned from the 1990s onward are valuable for Saudi Arabia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":35415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,163,404],"tags":[125,122,783],"class_list":["post-35422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-opinion-debate","category-visa-deepl","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-innovation-en","tag-the-opinion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35423,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35422\/revisions\/35423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}