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"Vision is the art of seeing things that are invisible, "said writer Jonathan Swift three hundred years ago.

Estonian President Lennart Meri has said, "A state, as well as a business, can not see itself as mere accounting numbers. Neither have a future without vision, mission and strategy, let alone the kind of future that shines". Where's vision, there's hope.

With the economic crisis today we face similar questions - to where from here, and how? Tartu university's economy professor Urmas Varblane admits that with or without crisis, due its simplicity our economy reaches its limit at the 2/3 productivity of European Union's average. Convergence allows us to get that far, but not far enough to join the successful. Hence, if we truly dream of joining Europe's most well-faring and nationally wealthy states, we need to think and act on a new level. We must have a realistic strategy to reach the high league. Unfortunately the signs show that our unskilled labour based, so called Southern-Finnish model, servicing the Scandinavia, is more likely to continue and we lack resources to become an equal partner.

We have a series of urgent questions in the way of success. For example, how and with whom we compensate for demographic decline and aging society. Today we have 4 working age individuals per pensioner, in 20 years we'll have three and in 40 years 1.8.

How to you invert an inside market oriented economy towards the outside world? Today majority of Estonia's export is produced by couple of hundred businesses, most of which are run by foreign capital. How can Estonian businessmen make foreign contacts, something the world competitors have already acquired while enrolled in international schools?

How to improve the quality of education and guarantee evenly good level of it in every region; using information technology maybe? What stops us deploying vocational education as a tool for retraining the unemployed? How to take the higher education to the world level? Who to school at home, who in the world and who pays? How can we change into a talent-attracting and tolerant country? Brains are valued and the competition for them is only heating up in the world.

 As a country we must ask, where to use our scant resources to change most effectively. How can we increase the competitiveness of different regions and rural areas? How to join the job market, education, science and development policies into a coherent whole? What changes should we make in our governing mechanisms to move from an administrating state to one more effective and innovative? Who are our role models and where are the next generation leaders to take Estonia to its next development jump.

These important, but nonetheless particular questions can not be answered until we have the direction to go to, inspiring as a vision and commonly felt.

In today's world there is nothing certain - there are only possibilities which arise and disappear faster and faster. The man and his nature have changed little over the time, but the cycle of principal changes in the world has shortened considerably. The rules of the game used to change after every 1000 years, then 300, 100 and after 25 years (in the 20th century). Today big changes take only 5 years to happen. We need to be keen, see opportunities in them and make them work for us. There are examples in the world of successful small countries who neighboured by unpredictable big countries have had to stay fit, in constant development and playing their part well.

Our world, more and more in change, shifting to Asia, aging and troubled by the lack of resources, will be like a roller coaster in the future. Our job is to understand the undeterminable as much as we can and increase our capability to succeed in the whirlpool of change. We must not let the crisis lower our self confidence and think ourselves small. Dutch or Danes have no more land than we do. Luxembourg's population is less than half of ours.

After the crisis we need to find in ourselves the will and ambition to increase the importance of our country - a mere self sufficiency as a measure is only half the truth. It is clear that post-crisis Estonia has to be more open to the world - in business as well as in values and in our understanding of the world in general. What's our part and ambition in the Nordic region, Europe and in the world at large? We have the presidency of the European Union at 2018 - what is our message to the Europe? In what lies that strength and uniqueness that would make us stand out in Europe and help us lead it forward? What is our vision of the Estonia that is globally competitive while remaining locally attractive? We must be equally open to all people who live here and who we welcome, who wish to live in our country and playing by our rules - go to school here, make business or marry.

A vision of a country is not just an adjective or sentence describing the future that anyone could shout out in their sleep. It is more of an inspiring and meaningful picture of the future, widely felt in the society. A kind of a bundle of dreams and hopes, moving towards which, we can agree on the important things - for a longer period than one election cycle and on a wider scale than one party's world view.

Here in the Development Fund we have analyzed growth opportunities of Estonia's economic sectors and we have an idea as of what to focus on. But when talking about the visions of the future we first need to discuss through more general goals we wish to reach. What kind of society are we aiming for, what kind of a value system we wish for? What are our ambitions in the educational sphere and our expectations of social and well-faring sphere? How open as a society we are and what kind of immigration policies are we ready to implement? How active and economic interests centred foreign politics are we ready for, etc. When we have reached mutual understanding in these things, we can continue discussing particular growth areas on which's development we should focus.

That is why we have initiated the discussion on Estonian Growth Vision 2018. This is the year when we celebrate the 100th birthday of our republic. By this year important changes need to be made, so that we would be ready to speak up in the high league. At the development forum "Estonia, Globally Competitive, Locally Attractive" we will hold the first public brain-storming on our way to the vision.

 Published in "Eesti Ekspress" in April 8th, 2010