Iceland review - 2004, Síða 76

ICELAND REVIEW SUPPLEMENT / 74
used to create a winter golf course. All it takes is to weave a web of hot-water
pipes beneath the grass and “voilá”: the greens and fairways stay clear during
the winter.
World’s most competitive nation
The biotech company Prokaria uses proprietary ecological genomics methods
and bioinformatics to directly discover novel genes in nature.
If you’re like most of us, you’ll have no idea what any of that means. And that’s
okay. What’s important is that right now Prokaria is just one of a number of
biotech companies operating in Reykjavík.
Led by deCODE Genetics, the biotech industry is flourishing in Iceland. The city
has become a sort of campus for biotech, as well as other industries. While there
are numerous reasons for this development, Reykjavík Resources has played an
integral part.
The company has helped link investors with these smaller companies in order to
raise capital. It’s all a part of the city’s mission to create a cluster of knowledge-
based companies, recruiting international brand names and world-renowned
companies as a magnet for further development. It’s this development that helps
to increases the overall competitiveness of Reykjavík, one of Reykjavík Resources
main goals.
How well are they doing? Iceland currently ranks in 5th place among the world’s
most competitive nations, according to the IMD World Competitiveness
Yearbook 2004. This is up from 8th place last year, and 11th place in 2002.
Doing it our way
Even through Reykjavík is small, as capital cities go, it still must perform the same
expensive tasks as a large capital. For example, Reykjavík’s local schools must pro-
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