Dear guests at this Seed Forum Iceland Investment conference!

It is with great pleasure for me to be here with you today.  Specially, I would like to thank Arion banki for hosting this important event and being the main sponsor.  

The Seed Forum is a good platform for investors who are interested in the business cases of the most promising seed and early stage growth companies in Iceland and the Nordic countries to meet and explore new possibilities.  
Furthermore it is obviously important that the entrepreneurs and the investors meet together to share thoughts and discuss new ideas.

As you all know we Icelanders have been struggling for the past few years to build up or you could say refresh our economy which was hit so hard by the financial collapse. This has taken us some time but I think we are now back on track but hopefully not on the same track as before the crises.  I know this better than many others being the financial minister during the most difficult time.  

But, we learned a lot from this time and we are still learning since we are still restructuring our economy. Some of the main lessons are probably that we must take a good care of our export industries and also to build up new industries which can stand beside our traditional export industries (mainly fisheries) here in Iceland.  One part of this work has been to increase focus on industries which can grow fast and can have diversify our economy.  This has led us to put more focus on the tourism, the creative industries and many types of start-up companies in different parts of the economy.  Of course this is not done overnight but I think we have taken important steps in recent years.  

To mention some examples we have put in action a hugely ambitious Investment plan for the next three years that can be described as a turning point as it establishes new priorities for innovation and development of the industries. The aim is to build strong foundation for more diversified economy.

In the wake of the financial collapse new legislation was passed by the Icelandic Parliament Althingi.  The objective of the new legislation was to strengthen research and development activity and improve the competitive condition of innovation enterprises by providing them with the right to tax credits in respect of costs of innovation projects. An innovation enterprise that owns research and development projects and has received the certification by Icelandic authorities has the right to a special tax credit against assessed income tax of 20% of the paid cost of such projects.
And during the most difficult budget deficit – when we had to cut down cost in almost every field of the state budget – we stood firmly guard of the competitive funds for research and technical development – Tækniþróunarsjóður and Rannsóknarsjóður. Instead of cutting down we increased the contribution to the funds. The only way to defeat the Economic depression is to rely on the innovation drive and creative power of the people.

In the end I would also like to mention the Green investment fund that was just recently established. The aim is to strengthen the foundations of the new and green economic system where environmentally friendly are in the frontline.

Thank you and I wish you all good luck with this conference today!