Business, Estonia, Good for Business, Investments, Rating

This year's competition focused on investment agencies' readiness and action during the coronavirus crisis. Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center rapidly reacted after the closure of borders by creating platforms for hosting virtual business visits and holding webinars. As part of the Hack the Crisis hackathon during the emergency situation, a team largely consisting of Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center employees created Suve, an AI-driven chat bot helping Estonia's citizens and foreign direct investors find official information about the coronavirus situation and the state's support measures, keeping emergency phone lines free for those in the most need. 

Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center has been developing its digital tools and channels for years, and has built a a tool for creating digitized value propositions and an electronic investment advisor, which together do the work of several people when it comes to distributing information and making value propositions to potential foreign investors. A new electronic multimedia assistant has also been added to the robot workforce this year, the purpose of which is to render marketing activities more efficient.

"Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center team is small yet efficient. With our limited resources we can only focus on investments that yield the most economic benefits. We have knowingly oriented ourselves towards creating highly paid positions all over Estonia and launching product and service development centers," Raido Lember, director of Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center, said.

"We are making an effort daily to ensure that positions with high added value are created in all Estonia's regions and that they have as big an economic impact in Estonia as possible. We are also knowingly working towards bringing as many investments into various locations in Estonia so that innovation and new jobs should not be concentrated in large hubs but instead boost life in Estonia as evenly as possible," he added. 

The volume of direct foreign investments of Enterprise Estonia's foreign investment center amounted to 235 million euros last year and jobs created by investors across Estonia numbered over 1,200.