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President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: our digital innovation journey moves forward

President Ilves

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No great work of art is ever truly finished. Estonia’s digitalisation efforts will continue to evolve, even as the country celebrates the fact that all government services are now available online. By eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy, Estonia has made citizen interactions with the government faster, simpler, and more transparent.

According to former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who is considered to be one of the key architects of the digital nation, the country will continue to innovate. Ilves predicts that, in the future, Estonians will continue to apply the same creativity that has allowed them to make all state services available digitally, including, most recently, divorce. President Ilves pointed out that this is particularly relevant given the adoption of artificial intelligence globally, as AI presents challenges for Estonia and opportunities to distinguish itself again.

“Neither Estonia nor Europe, I’m afraid, as a whole will ever become the AI powerhouse that China and the US are,” Ilves said, “simply because not enough money has been invested in it.” However, he noted that Estonia has always taken technologies created elsewhere and done ingenious things with them. Ilves cited the creation of X-Road, the secure data exchange layer that serves as the backbone for the country’s ecosystem of digital services, and Skype as examples of Estonians taking existing technologies and devising new products and services.

“We have to do the same thing when someone comes out with a great new technology in AI,” said Ilves. “The road forward for us as a country is to implement those new governance and public services developments,” President Ilves underscored. “And that’s where our creativity comes in.”

He also said that even if all services are now available digitally, the focus should continue to be on making governance easier for citizens. “You can now go from government office to office from your desk,” Ilves pointed out. “But the goal should be to offer people better solutions to their problems.”

He noted that this has been accomplished in Estonia, where registering a child’s birth is highly automated. When a child is born, the hospital automatically notifies the Population Register, and parents can complete the registration online by confirming the child’s name and other details. This is just one example of how Estonia’s digital government has reduced administrative hurdles, allowing citizens to focus on what truly matters. Once registered, the child is assigned a government-issued personal identification number, and their information is automatically shared with the Estonian Health Insurance Fund and the municipality where the parents are registered. “Young parents used to have to visit multiple offices separately, often during bad weather in February,” Ilves said. “Now, the process is streamlined and can be done conveniently from home.”

Birth of a Digital Nation

For President Ilves, the rise of Estonia as a digital nation has always been personal and political. Born in Stockholm to Estonian refugees and raised in a suburb of New York, a middle school math teacher taught him and other pupils to code in BASIC, a general programming language, in the early 1970s. This piqued his interest, and he remained fascinated by new technologies, spending the summer of 1975 programming at Columbia University. His interest resurfaced in the early 1990s when Ilves was serving as the Estonian ambassador to the US in Washington, and the country, founded in 1918 but occupied by the Soviets during the Second World War, was being reborn from the rubble of the USSR and was “in dire poverty.”

Ilves notes that Estonia was sandwiched between Norway and Finland in terms of GDP per capita before the war. At the start of the 1990s, the country’s GDP per capita was one-eighth of its northern neighbour’s. The need to catch up was acute, and Ilves, ever a tech geek, began using an early web browser called MOSAIC. It was something of a eureka moment. “I thought this is it. This is one area where we’re not behind,” Ilves said.

He subsequently lobbied the Estonian state to invest in making computers available to all schools in the country. Despite some early resistance, he found support from then Minister of Education Jaak Aaviksoo and President Lennart Meri. The program, dubbed Tiger Leap, was initiated at the end of 1996. It was a success, and by 1998, all Estonian schools were online and had computer labs. This fostered the creation of a new, tech-savvy generation.

Creating a Digital Commons

“It spread among young people and became a normal part of their lives,” Ilves observed. After becoming president in 2006, he frequently encountered these Tiger Leap program students, now grown into young entrepreneurs driving the success of Estonia’s startup scene. Startups began to spring up “like mushrooms after rain,” as the Estonian saying goes. “They would often tell me, ‘I was a kid in your program,'” Ilves recalled.

He noted that Estonians also changed thanks to the program and government services the state began rolling out in the early 2000s. “When it comes to technology, there is a willingness to accept and adopt it without too much fuss,” said Ilves. Estonians now consider their digital services to belong to them, not to any current government.

In this sense, Estonia’s politicians are stewards of a digital commons. They must ensure that people’s services work correctly.

“It doesn’t matter who is in government; people expect their digital services to work,” he said.

While sitting in Tallinn’s futuristic Ülemiste City, where many technology companies are headquartered, it’s almost difficult to imagine it began with floppy disks and an outlandish idea. However, people embraced technology as it gave them a new identity and fueled their ambitions.

“It was a kind of leap into modernity for a society that felt oppressed by its inherent backwardness because of the Soviet Union,” Ilves said. “We used technology to catch up.”

A New Mindset

During his presidency, he liaised with Taavi Kotka, the Estonian government’s chief information officer, and then Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to support the creation of the country’s e-Residency program, for example. This program allows entrepreneurs anywhere to open a business in Estonia and use its digital services after thorough vetting by state authorities. President Ilves called e-Residency the “logical outcome” of a general societal move to digital technologies.

“Estonia’s greatest achievement as a digital nation is not that one can get divorced online or that Estonians can vote in elections from anywhere in the world,” he said. “The most outstanding achievement is the change in how people think and relate to each other.”
“It’s the mindset that has come with these various sociotechnological developments,” President Ilves remarked. “The idea that you can do things in the digital era that you could not do before. In this way, you can change your possibilities and opportunities in life.”

 

Written by
Justin Petrone
Justin Petrone is a native New Yorker who was educated in Washington, DC, and Copenhagen, where he studied journalism and European affairs. He has resided in Estonia since 2002. He has worked as a journalist for more than two decades and has extensive experience writing about new technologies. He is also the author of 10 books of travel writing and fiction.

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