In 2014, the Finnish game developer Supercell brought in about 1,7 billion dollars in revenue with just 150 employees. That’s about 11 million dollars in revenue per employee.

Supercell had become a new champion of the Finnish economy but it generated very few jobs in exchange.

But that’s just great and let me tell why.

Supercell is in many ways a model for an economic model that will become more and more common in the coming years, and the Nordics are the perfect place to put that model into action.

Digitalization, robotics, drones and efficient networking will mean that more and more companies will generate their revenue with less and less employees. There’ll be a Supercell for logistics, commerce and manufacturing.

The traditional models of taxing salaries and sales as VAT to fund much of the modern welfare state will start to break down as this happens. The structural changes will lead to increase in unemployment – and if history is any guide, to social unrest as well. Digitalization will lead to riots.

The alternative is to embrace the Supercells of the world. To accept that an ever increasing portion of GDP will be generated by an ever smaller workforce.

This means that tax and welfare policies have to change radically as well. High tax on profits could be combined with low tax on incomes and a reform of the safety net around a basic income of some kind.

This is what I call a Champion economy.

In a Champion economy, a country sends forth a small Supercell to gather a big bag of money. Think about th hero in all those mythologies: a single warrior sent out to sort stuff out for the whole community.

In Ancient Greece there was the 300, Odysseus and the demigod Champions of Troy.

The Finnish saga Kalevala is actually based on a story like this. A heroic smith called Ilmarinen builds a machine called Sampo which spills out prosperity for all.

In traditional narratives Sampo is likened to a big state owned corporations, but what if the fable was interpreted more literally? As a story of a small band of Champions creating a wonderous machine to the benefit of all (yeah, Sampo leads to warfare in the Epic but let’s not go there).

So thebasic story of a Champion is this: a small band of activist heroes builds an enormous amount of value which is dispersed to the community as a whole while the Champion(s) are celebrated as heroes and elevated to a social status to match their deeds.

Is this a form of socialism? Of course it is. But it’s also not that far from the traditional Nordic welfare model that’s proven to be one of the more succesfull societal structures in the world.

The principle of taxing success and sharing the spoils is central to the systems of Sweden, Finland and Denmark. It’s worth noting that the owners of Supercell were some of the few Finnish tech millionaires to pay their taxes in full when a chunk of the company was sold to Japanese Softbank.

The Champion economy just shifts the balance of taxes and the focus of policy from the working masses to the superefficient Champions of the new economy.

The future belongs to small and nimble Champions. This will not change and it will happen. Full employment looks close to impossible in a world like this. This means that the Nordic welfare model must evolve or face an existential crisis.

The Champions are coming, and we need to learn how to celebrate them and turn them into the engines of prosperity they are. This all could start with the Supercells of the North.