Helsinki

Nokia's collapse was the best thing that ever happened to Helsinki's economy. When the mobile phone giant began hemorrhaging engineers around 2010, conventional wisdom predicted Finland's capital would suffer the fate of other single-company towns—Detroit with more snow. Instead, those 24,000 laid-off Nokia engineers became the seed stock for one of Europe's densest startup ecosystems. A city of 695,000 now hosts 747 startups, roughly 50 per 100,000 residents, with five homegrown unicorns worth a combined €17 billion. Supercell, Rovio, and Wolt all trace their DNA directly to Nokia alumni. Google has poured €4.5 billion into Finnish data centers; TikTok is building a €1 billion facility nearby. The biological parallel is adaptive radiation: when a dominant species (Nokia) disappears, the survivors don't just fill the old niche—they explode into dozens of new ones. Helsinki's engineers didn't rebuild Nokia; they became gaming studios, fintech platforms, health tech ventures, and food delivery empires. The city's startup density now rivals Stockholm's, but with a crucial difference: Helsinki's ecosystem emerged from creative destruction rather than gradual accumulation. Finland's culture of 'sisu' (stubborn resilience) combined with generous social safety nets meant engineers could take risks without personal ruin. The result is a startup factory that converts corporate collapse into entrepreneurial fuel. By 2026, the city's population will exceed 700,000 for the first time, driven largely by tech migration from elsewhere in Europe.