Along with the rest of the Smart City Community, in late September 2018, the STARDUST project attended the 4th Nordic Edge Expo & Conference in Norway. The Nordic Edge is an annual event where the Smart City community presents their latest innovative solutions. This makes it an ideal place for the project partners of the Horizon 2020 Smart Cities and Communities programme to catch up.
“Smart with a Heart” was the theme of this year’s Nordic Edge Expo and Conference. Being smart with a heart mean a lot of things but it mostly boils down to working together and letting people – both the developers and the users – of the technology be mindful of each other’s presence. Apart from the official event, several side-events were organised around this largest Smart City event in the Nordics.
4500 visitors from all across and beyond Europe attended this three-day event to present outcomes, exchange knowledge and meet with project partners. Project coordinators, universities, technical partners, municipalities, investors and decision makers are given the chance to meet like-minded people that hold the same enthusiasm at heart through knowledge exchange, networking and forging of new business opportunities.
STARDUST had the occasion to be recognised at the “Meet the New Lighthouse Cities” session alongside MAtchUP and IRIS, being the latest Lighthouse projects that entered the SCC1 community. STARDUST’s coordinator Florencio Manteca from CENER, as well as Maarit Vehviläinen, the city representative from the lighthouse city of Tampere, and Daniele Vettorato from EURAC presented the project, its main objectives and the results achieved so far.
For three days, all 12 SCC1 Lighthouse projects including STARDUST, Smart City Information System (SCIS) and the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) gathered altogether at a joint stand. At the stand, STARDUST was represented by CENER, the Lighthouse cities of Tampere and of Pamplona, Fondazione iCons – iCube Programme, EURAC and CluBE. Everyone had an opportunity to meet, talk and inform visitors about the overall SCC1 community and the individual projects and their solutions.
Moreover, an internal discussion with the title “Communication – How to make «invisible» projects visible” took place among communication representatives of various SCC1 projects, Lighthouse – and Follower Cities. Participants shared stories about how to communicate ideas through their projects or their cities in an international context about new pilots and themes. These pitches were illustrated graphically and moderated by facilitator Josh Stinton (Outspire). Among the participants of the event were Elisabeth Schmid and Anna Vilhula, who are representatives from STARDUST’s Fondazione iCons and Tampere respectively. In parallel to these public sessions, the SCC1 group met at different internal sessions focusing on topics such as big data or business models and finance.
In addition to that, the SCC1 Replication Task Group, in collaboration with INEA, the European Commission and SCIS and supported by Morgenstadt and the Nordic Edge, organised the “CROSS-SCC Replication Workshop”, a session for fostering replication and upscaling of Smart City solutions amongst the SCC1 community. Over 70 participants discussed topics such as low energy districts, integrated infrastructure, urban mobility and urban governance. According to Yannis Fallas and Nikos Ntavos of CluBE, the CROSS-SCC Replication Workshop provided the floor to all participants the opportunity to exchange and share knowledge in order to enable procurement and implementation of Smart City Solutions.
The Nordic Edge 2018 was a full success, offering the Smart City community the possibility to meet, discuss challenges, exchange knowledge and best practices and also to network and create new business opportunities. Events like these are at the heart of all the technological and scientific advances that the more than 380 SCC1 project partners (and all the other Smart City stakeholders across the world!) are working on day by day. The theme of this year’s Nordic Edge has thus absolutely brought it to the point. We need to be “Smart with a Heart!”. See you all next year for Nordic Edge 2019 again.
