How Boards Can Become Finland's Growth Engine?

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:30:00 +0200
Aalto Leaders' Insight, Leadership, Aalto EE Finland

This blog post is informed by the collective ideas and insights that emerged during the TUTA Board Breakfast discussion at Aalto University. It is intended as a practical guide for board chairs, nomination committees, and board members who want to ensure that growth remains consistently on the agenda and is actively driven. The aim is to support boards in understanding the current base case, defining a full-potential growth plan, and organizing their work to help deliver on that potential.

Finland has all the ingredients to build globally successful companies: world-class education, strong institutions, deep technological expertise, and a culture of trust. Yet when we look at how Finnish companies have grown compared to their global peers, a sobering pattern emerges. Too many plateaus. Too few scales. Too few can sustain the fast pace of growth over decades, which would necessitate them pulling multiple growth levers in parallel in a big way.

Over the past decade, the top 20 publicly listed companies grew on average by around 3% per year. Comparable global peers grew closer to 8%.

This is not a talent problem.
It is not a technology problem.
It is not even a capital problem.

It is, to a significant extent, a question of governance and ambition. Only two of the twenty largest Finnish publicly listed companies target growth in line with the global average. And that places the Board of Directors at the center of the growth challenge.

Only two of the twenty largest Finnish publicly listed companies target growth in line with the global average.

If Finnish companies matched the growth rates of their global peers, the impact would extend far beyond shareholder returns. Stronger growth would mean more jobs, a broader tax base, and greater international relevance. It has been estimated that the growth gap among the largest companies alone has cost the Finnish economy €30–40 billion in GDP over the past decade.

Growth is not only a business issue. It is a societal one.

The encouraging news is this: growth is not an accident. It is shaped by choices — about ambition, risk, capital allocation, and time horizon. And those choices sit squarely in the boardroom.

When companies grow, societies renew themselves. New industries emerge, talent stays, and confidence compounds. Board decisions quietly influence whether companies become global leaders, specialized niche players, or gradual decliners. In that sense, board work is one of the most underappreciated levers of national competitiveness.

Why growth so often stalls

In conversations with business leaders and board members, we repeatedly hear the same concerns. Finnish companies do many things well, but growth rarely becomes a sustained, long-term priority. Several barriers appear again and again.

Strategic and ownership barriers

When the companies set the growth targets too low, short-term ownership mindsets favor dividends and share buybacks over investments into growth. Ownership structures are often fragmented, with too few active owners who would clearly state that they value the growth component on TSR. Capital markets tend to be cautious, making bold international expansion or transformative innovation harder to finance. In publicly owned or semi-public companies, policy inertia can further limit entrepreneurial direction.

Cultural and mindset barriers

There is often a “good enough” ceiling, a quiet discomfort with aiming for global leadership. We are satisfied with too little. Fear of failure and public criticism can reduce experimentation and bold decision-making. Consensus culture, while valuable, can slow decisions and blur accountability. And success in growth is rarely celebrated loudly enough to create role models that inspire others.

Governance barriers

Many of these challenges surface directly in the boardroom. Growth topics are crowded out by compliance and reporting, not only in committees but also on the plenary agenda. Boards lack members with firsthand experience of sustained scaling. KPIs emphasize control over exploration. Long-term ambition fades under short-term pressure.

What all of this means is simple: even when opportunities exist, the system surrounding management often makes growth harder than it needs to be.

There is often a “good enough” ceiling, a quiet discomfort with aiming for global leadership. We are satisfied with too little.

From oversight to growth engine: redefining the board’s role

Traditionally, boards are seen as guardians: overseeing risk, ensuring compliance, and monitoring performance. These responsibilities remain essential. But they are not enough. Boards do much more than approve strategies. They design the system in which strategies live or die.

Board shape:

The level of ambition

The tolerance for uncertainty and potential loss

The allocation of capital, opex, and talent

The incentives that drive the required behavior

The topics that receive time, depth, and seriousness in the board meetings

Often, the reason for growth failure is the surrounding system that quietly discourages boldness, patience, and long-term thinking. If the ambition is not high enough, the organization feels little pressure to build a strong pipeline of attractive growth opportunities. In that sense, boards are not just supervisors. They are architects of the company’s future.

The levers boards truly control

From our discussions with board members, five structural levers consistently determine whether growth accelerates or plateaus:

1. Ambition defines the ceiling

Boards define what “winning” looks like. If the ambition is framed around “stability” or “defending margins,” management will optimize accordingly. Ambition is not a slogan. It is the implicit permission to think bigger than the current business model.

2. Portfolio logic determines risk tolerance

Companies are rarely one business, but more often a portfolio. Yet many boards apply the same expectations to all parts of the portfolio: when new ventures are measured by the same short-term performance criteria as established operations, they rarely stand a chance.

3. Resource flows reveal true priorities

What gets funded grows, and what gets starved shrinks. The same is true for talent: where the best people go, the future is built. Boards have the authority and responsibility to redirect not only capital but also leadership attention and top talent toward the company’s most promising growth opportunities.

“Show me a board agenda, and I’ll tell you what kind of company you are building.”

4. Incentives translate intent into behavior

Boards design incentive systems that either encourage learning and intelligent risk-taking, or quietly guide the leaders to put their effort elsewhere. People do what they are rewarded for: if short-term efficiency dominates reward systems, exploration becomes rhetorical.

5. Attention shapes reality

Agenda time is the scarcest resource in governance. What the board discusses first, deepest, and most often becomes the real strategy. Board agendas are not administrative tools; they are strategic signals.

As one participant summarized, “Show me a board agenda, and I’ll tell you what kind of company you are building.”

The three tensions holding back board-driven growth

At the TUTA Board Breakfast, a clear pattern emerged: while everyone agreed that growth is important, only a few could demonstrate that their governance model consistently enabled it.

Three structural tensions surfaced:

1. Control vs. ambition

Boards are often selected for risk control and continuity. But growth requires experience with uncertainty, scaling, and reinvention. Without lived growth experience in the room, ambition becomes abstract. That’s when caution starts to dominate the actions. This is why board composition matters more than most governance codes acknowledge.

2. Stated priorities vs. time allocation

Many boards claim growth is a strategic priority number one, but their annual calendars are dominated by reporting cycles, audit reviews, and incremental updates. This leaves very little space for what needs to be discussed for the future. Successful boards treat the agenda itself as a strategic tool.

3. Incrementalism vs. dynamic reallocation

Most capital processes are incremental: last year plus or minus a few percent. But growth often requires discontinuous reallocation. Without explicit mechanisms to reassign capital, talent, and attention, the past funds itself.