"How about your lasagna?” asked my boyfriend, on one of those anonymous nights in quarantine that blend into so many. We’d fallen into the inevitable quagmire of what to have for dinner, something that throughout the pandemic became the north star of our day, the current that kept us moving. “That is, if it’s not too much trouble. I’m happy to help”, he added. I nodded. It would never be too much trouble really, but I felt more eager to make it detecting the gentle plea in his voice. I knew it was his favourite dish of mine. Not because it was anything particularly ground-breaking but for the opposite; because it represented something comforting, something familiar. While the act of making lasagna—dutifully chopping up the veg, simmering the ragu, whipping the bechamel into excruciating smoothness and carefully layering the golden cuts of pasta one by one—might seem like a labour of love for him, in hindsight I can see it’s always been more gratifying for me.

In the Western context, the term samurai has become synonymous with men, but female samurai warriors, known as the onna-bugeisha, were once just as prominent. These women were trained in martial arts to protect communities that lacked male defenders. History has long obscured their existence, but the stories of their heroics are beginning to resurface.

What does innovation mean in the Nordic context? The ideas changing the way we live, big or small, share a red thread – whether they’re coming from a huge multinational like H&M, a niche start-up with a vision to connect the world, like Mapillary, or even a beauty brand challenging the corporate norm. “It’s about equality, it’s about fairness, it’s about humanity,” replies Simon Caspersen, the co-founder of IKEA’s external ideas lab, SPACE10, when asked what characterizes new thinking in the north. Those shared values have been around long before tech start-ups and the circular economy – and it’s likely that whatever the new ideas to come, those values will still lie at the core of Nordic innovation.