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Silicon Valley and Finland 73risk in creating the new GSM standard. The figure also shows how publicfunding also helped Nokia to continue its R&D investment during the severefinancial trouble it experienced that coincided with the Finnish recession of1981–4. Still, as we can also see in figure 2.11, Nokia has always beenresponsible for most of its own R&D funding, and, excluding the exceptionalpublic investment of the 1980s, the public share has on average beenless than 5 percent, and in 2000 it constituted only 0.3 percent, of Nokia’stotal R&D investment.In fact, Finnish financing of innovation has for decades been primarilyled by the private sector. As can be seen in figure 2.12, private investment has,for a long time, been more than half of the total and has been a slightly largershare than in the “business-driven” United States. Figure 2.5 illustrates thisfact from a different angle: the role of public funding in business R&Dprojects has always remained at the low level of about 5 percent, which islower than in the United States.Whereas Tekes has helped in the development of Finnish R&D financing,Sitra has done the same for the venture capital market. Until the early 1990s,Finland’s venture capital market was very underdeveloped and Sitra startedthe push for the formation of this capital, which is critical for the financing ofhigh-risk innovation. Gradually, the venture capital market has grown and istoday led by the private sector, which now has an 85 percent share of totalinvestments. However, compared to Silicon Valley, the venture capital marketis not sufficiently advanced.807060504030201001981 1990 2001USFinlandFigure 2.12 Private R&D investment as a share of the total (%),1981–2001