I lived in Malmö for quite awhile and knew and worked in tech with many highly educated people, quite a few of them who graduated from Lund. I think that Lund and Malmö tech scene is a bit of a bubble. As I got to know some of the Swedes I worked with deeply, I started to hear complaints from many of them about the societal groupthink that exists in Sweden. There really is a strong sense of collectivism in Sweden, it just seems that the tech scene has been able to break away from it to a certain extent.
That said, I enjoyed many of the same things that you mention about Sweden. The people I worked with were highly educated, pragmatic, and often not willing to make bad engineering decisions if there was no reason to. It was easy to have very in-depth conversations with Swedes about many topics without resulting to emotional attacks or divisiveness.
In general I think what has helped Swedes the most (and what grandparent has hinted at) is that Swedish citizens, at least everyone I met, are very internationally minded in that they are absolutely voracious travelers and embrace people of other cultures rather easily (there are the Swedish Democrats, of course, but this mentality is still a relative minority in Sweden). This willingness to interact internationally and deal with other cultures is what I think has helped propel Sweden to the kind of startup success we are seeing here.
That said, I enjoyed many of the same things that you mention about Sweden. The people I worked with were highly educated, pragmatic, and often not willing to make bad engineering decisions if there was no reason to. It was easy to have very in-depth conversations with Swedes about many topics without resulting to emotional attacks or divisiveness.
In general I think what has helped Swedes the most (and what grandparent has hinted at) is that Swedish citizens, at least everyone I met, are very internationally minded in that they are absolutely voracious travelers and embrace people of other cultures rather easily (there are the Swedish Democrats, of course, but this mentality is still a relative minority in Sweden). This willingness to interact internationally and deal with other cultures is what I think has helped propel Sweden to the kind of startup success we are seeing here.