The Baltic Innovation Fund, announced on Wednesday, takes in €40m from the European Investment Fund (EIF) and €20m each from the national investment guarantee agencies of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The EIF will select private-sector fund managers who will then have to raise matching funds (at a minimum) from their usual contacts.

There are no set targets regarding how much of this cash will go to the technology sector, but, given the existence of budding tech startup scenes in all three countries, it would be vastly surprising if they didn’t get a significant share.

“This particular region of the European economy has shown good dynamism in that area, and we hope this will be a further stimulus for that kind of activity,” EIF northern Europe chief Graham Cope told me. “We’re leaving the scope of investment opportunities very wide to allow the fund managers full freedom [but] equity of this nature tends towards certain sectors. Technology is one of them; so are life sciences. We’re looking at growth-focused sectors.”

It is, as I mentioned above, unusual for European countries to band together in this way. Indeed, Cope noted that the EIF has already got similar arrangements in place with individual countries such as the UK, but had not until now dealt with multiple states at once.

But there’s a reason for that: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are all pretty tiny, which makes it very hard to attract venture capital there.

“The individual Baltic markets are quite small on their own, and all individual entrepreneurs there are thinking pan-Baltic if not pan-European,” Cope said. “We guided the member states to work together to create Baltic market activity [through critical mass]. It’s more in line with the way private investors see the market, as well.”

The action will apparently start next year, when the EIF will start to process transactions with between three and six fund managers. The cash is expected to support a four-year investment period.

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Some people are taking the idea a little further however.

Just look at Estonia, the tiny Eastern European nation (population 1.3 million), where a new project is being put in place with the ambition of getting every six year old to learn coding at school.

The “ProgeTiiger” scheme, according to reports, will begin pilots this year with the ambition of getting school kids of all ages to start coding. There’s no suggestion yet that the classes will be mandatory, but the organization behind the move the Tiger Leap Foundation, says it wants to produce more creative computer users.

“The first e-courses are meant for primary school teachers and they will take place at the educational portal http://www.koolielu.ee (Koolielu is Estonian for “school life”) that the Foundation maintains,” the group’s head of training, Ave Lauringson, told me. ”We expect about 30 teachers to take part in the first course. So we are just taking our first steps now, but we intend to expand the program significantly.”

The idea — which is being developed with funding from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research — is that children in grades 1-4 will take coding classes as part of their normal curriculum. After that, they can join extracurricular “coding clubs”, explained Lauringson. The foundation itself was developed by current Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and education minister Jaak Aaviksoo in the late 1990s, with the aim of bringing internet connections to all schools in the country.

Given those credentials, it’s clear that while Tiger Leap has no concrete agreement to expand the pilot into a mandatory system, it’s clearly a stepping stone to a larger national program.

If it seems ambitious, you must understand the context. Not only do many Western education systems fail to teach computer science to any meaningful degree — the paucity of teaching in Britain left Eric Schmidt “flabbergasted”, for example — but Estonia is already a hotbed of technical talent. There are dozens of big companies that use Estonian engineers and whole startups (Skype being the most famous example) whose products were built on the back of Estonian skills.

So how do you inculcate an entire nation like that? It’s partially possible because Estonia is a small country, but also because it’s made some decisions along the way to prioritize technical literacy.

Since gaining its independence from Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, its politicians and business leaders have followed a deliberate, direct path to try and build the country into a technologically-advanced nation.

These days most of Estonia’s government services are run online, most of its banking is done online, and there’s a significant corps of programmers who have built some really important companies. It’s working, and Tiger Leap’s idea is clearly to try and muscle that advantage along even further.

How do other countries replicate that?

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The group, which claims to be the first of its kind in Europe, had been due to close its doors to applicants on Tuesday. But in an email, co-founder Paul Bragiel told me that the decision to extend the deadline was not because they had not had enough high quality submissions.

“[We] had a big uptake in applications starting yesterday, so just want to make sure we can accommodate,” said Bragiel, who is also a partner at early stage program I/O Ventures in San Francisco.

“I have been quite happy with the applications. Honestly I was wary they would be weak compared to the ones I see with I/O Ventures [where he is also a partner] … but I have been pleasantly surprised.”

The projects submitted so far, he says, include a great deal of mobile and location-based gaming projects, as well as gamification services. There was also some social gaming “but that is considerably less than I saw a year or two ago.”

The program, which is based in Estonia, aims to bring together teams to develop their existing game-related products — which should already be in beta at least — over three months. A range of mentors will arrive from around the Central, Eastern and Baltic regions come together to work with a maximum of 10 companies, with a program that starts in September.

While it is a little unusual to extend deadlines for positive reasons, Bragiel’s co-founder Sven Illing told me that it was not uncommon — and pointed to the example of Startupbootcamp Berlin, which recently extended its deadline after a surge in attention.

“It seems a good idea to use the momentum,” he said. “You can never have too many good applications.”

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Update: An earlier version of this article said the company was based in Estonia. Which was stupid, since it’s not.

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