Kaspar Korjus: «Estonia has the most startups per capita and this startup culture has led to fail and fail and try again»

(Versión en castellano aquí)

When Kaspar Korjus was born (Tartu,1987), he was assigned the number 38712012796 before he was named, as happens with everyone else in Estonia. It is his digital identification. In this small Baltic country, that number is used for nearly every administrative transaction: medical receipts, taxes, business management and, of course, electronic voting, among others. Not only is Estonia the most technologically advanced country in the world, but it also has the cleanest air on the planet.   

Kaspar is the Managing Director of the e-residency programme, an innovative project that has created a framework of digital citizenship where anyone in the world with internet access has within their reach an endless amount of digital services that allow, among other things, remote business creation and administration. We meet Kaspar at his office in Tallin so that he can explain to us how a country that used to belong to the now extinct Soviet Union has managed in such a short time to lead digital transformation at a global level. We are in the last days of August, it’s 15 °C and raining.

Interview conducted by 47804290049 and 37011020138.       

What’s e-residency and what’s the difference between e-residence and citizenship?

E-residency is a totally new concept associated with the idea of citizenship, which cannot be compared to anything else in the world –because there is nothing similar. E-residency doesn’t allow you to travel or vote with that card, but it gives digital rights. It gives you digital access to services, such as a digital signature, bank account, business creation and administration, etc. A digital e-resident can do anything that local people in Estonia can do. Digital citizenship is like a 21st century country, it’s the first fully digital country that is meant for everybody. Because everybody, internationally, can belong to this. For the first time there is a country which accepts you and gives you a digital name, and every time you try to log in to some service there is an institutional entity that says this is you. It’s the first time a country can verify the identity of any person on the planet. That’s why you can start using new services you could not use before.

Who had the idea of opening e-residency to any citizen? Why did Estonia create e-residency?

We created it first because we already had the infrastructure. For fifteen years Estonians have been voting online, declaring taxes online, getting prescriptions… And now we are just allowing foreigners to do the same. When we started we didn’t have an exact understanding of who would want to be an e-resident and why, and what the benefit would be for Estonia. The promoter was Estonian Taavi Kotka, who together with Ruth Annus and Simm Sikkut presented the idea “10 million e-residents by 2025” to a tender to the Estonian Development Foundation in 2014. Then I became part of the project as I got a scholarship, and we’ve been working together for two years. Throughout the first days and months we started to understand the story behind e-residency; who would like to become an e-resident and what they would need to do. E-residents have told us from day one what laws we need to change to make the environment easier, what new services and processes they want… We have passed many different laws to make e-residents happy.