Over a hundred years ago, Sweden was among the poorest countries in Europe. Today, it’s one of the leaders in advancing Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Life Science, Clean Technology and Gaming. It’s simply one of the most innovative countries in the world. 3-point seatbelt, the pacemaker and mobile telephony –they are among the many genius Swedish innovations that the world has been taking advantage of, providing people jobs and saving many lives. Now, an exhibition, dubbed as Innovative Sweden, will go on a tour all over the world from 2011 to 2013 to showcase twenty Swedish startups’ trailblazing technological breakthrough. First stop will be Stanford, California on November 2-11, 2011.

Sweden has always pride its undying spirit of innovation. With a population of only 9 million, they sure have big ideas to fair to the world. Sweden allows its children to think and act freely, as well as pay less attention to stern work hierarchies. It is one of the countries to put a lot of public money on research and development, and has sprung companies like Ericsson, ABB, SKF, Sandvik, Tetra Pak, Alfa Laval, AGA, and Atlas Copco. Their novelties are revolutionized 1800s and 1900s ideas.

The exhibition will be packed with extensive program of presentations, seminars, workshops, keynotes and media, and will be dolled up by White, one of Sweden´s foremost architectural firms.

One of the Swedish companies to take the world by storm is Spotify. They first established on the European shores and stole the hearts of their subscribers. They recently expanded their territory over to the US after months of negotiation with the country’s formidable record labels. We also have Gluster, an open-source platform which recently got Brightcove as one of its big customers. Gluster will power the latter’s Video Cloud offering. It also locked a deal with City Network Hosting, another Swedish company on hosting solutions, to power its City Cloud offering, Sweden’s first IaaS platform.

Sweden has been hosting a good deal of competitions and exhibitions to encourage startups. Back in May, The Copenhagen Games Collective hosted Nordic Games Indie Night, a Swedish-based games festival featuring video games. There were 8 games who made it to the finals.