How can medium sized cities interact across borders to boost an integrated digital labor market? How can cities improve the growth potential of their startup scenes by structured cross-border collaboration? What is the interest and potential for sharing resources, benchmark outcomes and promote joint networks?
These are some of the questions addressed in a small pilot project “Connecting Digital Start-up Ecosystems in Nordic Cities”, initiated by BDF and carried out jointly by BDF, Turku Science Park and Future Place Leadership. The project, co-funded by Nordic Council of Minister’s “Branding the Nordic Region” funding scheme, takes a snapshot of the current state of how cities connect with their start-up scenes and explores ways how these communities and cities can co-operate across border.
Three non-capital Nordic cities are invited to provide cases for the project: Aarhus, Gothenburg and Turku. Representatives for city administration, business development agencies, start-up communities and other experts from the three cities were gathered 4 April 2017 at a workshop lead by the project partners and hosted by Turku Science Park. They exchanged best practice and explored the interest of connecting and mutual learning. For inspiration and benchmark, the capital cities Helsinki and Tallinn were invited to introduce their experience. The Swedish Agency for Economic & Regional Growth and the Nordic Council of Ministers joined with ideas for start-up network initiatives for the Baltic Sea Region.
Read the report here.
The project idea is inspired by the “State of the Digital Region 2016, Cities Connecting the Digital Economy in the Baltic Sea Region”, published by ICT think tank “Top of Digital Europe”.
