As Nokia's dominance grew in the early 2000s, complacency and bureaucracy crept in. In what now seems a sadly apposite jibe, given the Microsoft takeover, the group's headquarters in Espoo, just outside central Helsinki, became known as “the PowerPoint Palace”, filled with middle managers obsessed about internal politics and making presentations prepared with the Microsoft tool. Riitta Nieminen-Sundell, a sociologist who worked at the company until 2005, calls the Nokia tale a “Greek tragedy”.

If so, it is a tragedy that Finns hope will have a strong next act. Valtteri Halla, who led development of the homegrown Nokia operating system MeeGo and is now chief technology officer of Leia Media, a start-up, says: “The Nokia palace has collapsed. It was a great fortress and there are huge building blocks lying around, from which people can make things.”

Ms Nieminen-Sundell says: “[Nokia] educated one or two generations of Finns in international business, [planting] the idea that we can do it and we're not a tiny country next to Sweden, almost in Russia.”

From his ministry corner office, with a view of the harbour and the historic Aleksanterinkatu district in central Helsinki, Mr Vapaavuori says the decline of Nokia was a bigger psychological blow to Finnish self-esteem than it was a hit to the economy.

Finnish start-ups and small technology companies are trying to prove his point. Among them are gaming companies Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans) and Rovio (Angry Birds). Another is Jolla, staffed mostly with ex-Nokians, which is developing open-source software and innovative phones in an echoing office block shared with Supercell. (“Jolla” means “little sailing ship” in Finnish, with the implication that it was a lifeboat leaving the sinking ship.)

Jolla co-founder Antti Saarnio says the message to the country is that “it's time to wake up” and provide even more support for smaller and medium-sized technology companies. This sentiment echoed a tweet by Ilkka Paananen, the Supercell chief executive, who said “Finland needed this” after the deal was announced.

While the transition to this post-Nokia era began two or more years ago, an obvious problem is that these smaller companies cannot hope, even if they grow, to replace all of the 14,000 jobs that Nokia has shed in Finland in the past three years, as well as other work that was dependent on the company.

Ebba Dahli, a former Nokia employee and now a partner with Kaato, which connects inward investors with opportunities and employees in Finland, says: “One of the big challenges is it's not only Nokia [restructuring] – the same is going on in shipbuilding and the paper industry.”

Mr Ala-Pietila's report into the future of the technology sector is partly aimed at making the most of the Nokia building blocks, by helping Finland apply the technology skills it has learnt across many different sectors, beyond telecommunications.

Start-ups, despite their enthusiasm and ambition, will be less important for employment than sustained investment by Microsoft and other large international employers with Finnish operations.

Finns may exude a surface calm about the Nokia deal but shortly after the Microsoft announcement there was palpable relief that Broadcom of the US had stepped in to rescue the Finnish operations of Renesas, the Japanese chipmaker, including preserving the jobs of hundreds of people in the northern town of Oulu, where Nokia remains a large employer.

Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, has done his best to reassure Finnish politicians and Nokia staff this week that Finland will remain an important part of the strategy of the company. In Salo, a Nokia smartphone facility northwest of Helsinki, Mr Ballmer was asked by one of 1,200 staff: “Does this mean we all get Xboxes?” He said they would.

Mr Kiljander, now a director at F-Secure, a computer security group, says however painful for those who contributed to Nokia's success, the sale to Microsoft makes sense. “Nokia gets rid of something that could have drowned the whole company and Microsoft gets something that allows it to continue driving its mobile strategy,” he says.

In the longer term it will take more than a handout of gaming consoles to some staff and Microsoft's ￡250m investment in a new Finnish data centre to fill the hole left in Finland as Nokia has shrunk over the past few years.

In a strange way, Finnish people suggested that the hole was probably bigger for those Finns who did not have a direct stake in Nokia, but had become used to it being the handheld calling card by which foreigners from Barcelona to Beijing recognised their country. Now that the speculation about Nokia's ownership is over, it may be easier for Finns both inside and outside the company to stop raking over the errors of the past and to start building the future.

Samuli Hanninen, an engineer and Nokia vice-president responsible for smartphone imaging technology, says that when he was briefed on the forthcoming announcement one Saturday he “opened a beer and went to do some gardening”. This week, presenting the news to his team, he called for questions. One engineer put up his hand. “Can we go back to work now?”