TALLINN INVESTIGATION : From Skype to the Estonian Mafia, the world leader of location-free entrepreneurs supported by the state, the EU and a dense angels and VC network.

This article presents the results of my Estonian investigation, third case study of my PhD in Urban Science entitled “Stakeholder engagement in Smart-City: Participatory governance in urban complexity”. It has been conducted between May and July 2020 and consisted in identifying by internet-based research and word of mouth, the key stakeholders of decision-making in the Smart-City and startup field in Tallinn. I collected data from survey to the inhabitants, did one-to-one interviews and social network analysis. My initial plan to organize meetups as participatory workshops around my research as been compromised by the sanitarian measures due to covid_19.

This investigation is the following of a first one presenting Tallinn and the Estonian context in a monograph “TALLINN MONOGRAPH: Finno-Baltic Origins, fore-running the e-Government system of a no-border nation, may become the new Silicon Valley in Europe.” It reveals that Estonia has lived under external domination for centuries, and retrieved its independence lately in the beginning of the 90’s. The country economy was in a very poor condition and deployed a “shock therapy” series of deep reforms to set the infrastructure of a liberal democratic system that would serve the people first and offer them the tools to build their economic independence as fast as possible. The…