Norwegian innovation policy still treats entrepreneurship as a matter of individual talent, courage and ideas. However, in the digital economy, opportunities are increasingly shaped by platforms: algorithms, infrastructures and global gatekeepers that decide who becomes visible, who gains access to networks, and who can scale.
Sardar Wasi Ahmed, PhD; Associate Professor, NTNU
The persistent myth of entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is still framed as a story about individuals: bold founders, brilliant ideas, and the courage to take risks. It is an appealing narrative, and a convenient one. It places success and failure squarely in the hands of entrepreneurs. Policymakers can fund them, educators can train them, and society can celebrate them. The story is clean, motivating, and easy to communicate, but it is increasingly a myth.
In the digital economy, entrepreneurs do not act in isolation. Opportunities are not simply discovered or created by lone individuals with the right mindset. They emerge through interactions, feedback loops, and digitally mediated environments that few entrepreneurs fully understand and fewer still control. Clinging to the myth of the independent entrepreneur risks obscuring how entrepreneurship actually works today, and, more importantly, where power truly lies.
The reality is more structural – and more uncomfortable. Entrepreneurship has become deeply embedded in digital ecosystems, specifically platform-oriented entrepreneurial environments, where algorithms, interfaces, and infrastructures connect actors, resources, and markets at scale. These platforms are not neutral tools sitting quietly in the background; they actively shape opportunity. They are gatekeepers.
How platforms coordinate opportunities, visibility, and collaboration
Platforms determine what becomes visible and what remains hidden. They govern who gains access to networks, how value is created, and how collaboration unfolds. Through continuous feedback loops, they enable agile forms of co-creation, in which products, services, and even opportunities are constantly redefined through interaction with users and other platform participants. In this environment, opportunities are not simply “out there” waiting to be seized. They are filtered, shaped, and often actively produced by the platforms themselves.
For entrepreneurs, this fundamentally changes the game. Gaining visibility on the right marketplace, appearing in the right algorithm, and being invited into the right digital community are not incidental advantages. They are increasingly the primary determinants of entrepreneurial success.
This dynamic is not limited to e-commerce. Innovation platforms coordinate collaborative development. Professional networking sites shape who connects with whom and who is seen as credible. Investor forums influence which ideas attract capital. Open-source communities determine whose contributions gain recognition. Across all of these environments, the same logic applies: the platform structures the opportunity, and the entrepreneur must navigate, or be navigated by, its rules.
New winners and losers: structural inequality in the platform economy
If platforms structure opportunities, they also structure inequality. Entrepreneurs increasingly depend on infrastructures they did not build, do not own, and cannot meaningfully influence. Algorithms rank them. Interfaces frame them. Platform rules can change overnight, and often do. Success is no longer just about the quality of ideas or effort; it also depends upon one’s position within systems that operate according to their own commercial logics.
Research shows that access to platform capabilities, network position, and strong connections within digital environments play a decisive role in entrepreneurial performance. Those who are well positioned within digital ecosystems can scale rapidly, reaching global markets from day one. Others remain invisible, not because their ideas are inferior, but because they lack the platform access, digital literacy, or network connections that algorithmic systems reward.
This produces a new kind of inequality: less visible than traditional barriers, but deeply structural in its effects. Entrepreneurs who cannot afford premium placement, who lack connections to established platform communities, or whose offering does not fit neatly into existing platform categories face structural disadvantages, ones that no amount of individual talent or effort can easily overcome.
A policy blind spot: why current frameworks fall short
Despite this profound shift in how entrepreneurship unfolds, innovation policy still speaks the language of individuals. In Norway, policy frameworks mostly focus on entrepreneurs, teams, and ideas – in short, on people. They pay far less attention to the digital infrastructures that shape what those people can actually do and whether they have a fair chance to succeed.
This creates a fundamental mismatch between how entrepreneurship is governed and how it actually works. Policy intervenes at the level of the individual, while the decisive action happens at the level of the platform. It is somewhat like subsidizing a shop while ignoring whether a road exists to reach it.
The challenge is compounded by the fact that the most consequential platforms are neither Norwegian, Nordic, nor public. They are global, privately controlled, and operate according to commercial logics that are not necessarily aligned with public policy goals, such as regional balance, social inclusion, or democratic participation in economic opportunity. When a small Norwegian entrepreneur’s visibility depends on decisions made in Silicon Valley or Beijing, the limits of nationally oriented policy become starkly apparent.
The result is a structural blind spot: policy targets visible actors while the invisible architectures of opportunity remain largely unaddressed.
Towards a platform-aware innovation policy
This raises a question that Norwegian policymakers can no longer postpone: who really governs entrepreneurship today? If platforms organize access to markets, networks, visibility, and collaboration, then they also shape the distribution of entrepreneurial opportunities across society. This is not merely an academic observation, it is a question of economic sovereignty, fairness, and Norway’s ability to shape its own innovation future in a world increasingly organized by platform logics it does not control.
A platform-aware innovation policy must move beyond the individual entrepreneur as its primary unit of concern. It must engage seriously with the systems that structure entrepreneurial action: how platforms allocate attention, create dependencies, and concentrate power. This requires asking new questions: Which platforms are Norwegian entrepreneurs most dependent on? What are the terms of that dependency? Where do platform logics conflict with public policy goals? And where might Norway – either individually or through Nordic cooperation – build, support, or regulate alternatives?
Entrepreneurship will always be about people – about drive, creativity, and the willingness to build something new. But in the platform economy, platforms increasingly determine which people and ideas get a genuine chance. Aligning Norwegian innovation policy with this reality is not a peripheral concern. It is both an urgent challenge and one of the most significant opportunities the Nordic region has to lead the way in shaping a more inclusive and sovereign digital innovation future.
Foto Getty