Under the heading “The Top of Europe – A Competitive Baltic Sea Region Ready for the Future?”, this year´s BDF State of the Region Report once again takes the temperature on growth, innovation and competitiveness in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR). The three authors Christian Ketels, Helge J. Pedersen and Mikael Olsson analyses the BSR economy and assesses the state…

“Adaptation is about re-evaluating tradeoff options; this requires more voices, not less” John Matthews, Coordinator, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation   On the 30th November 2017 Urban climate adaptation was the theme of the day as participants gathered to engage with industry experts, experience best practice cases, and learn about decision making tools. Part of a regional series of training days…

Download here   The future is not jobless, but learning intensive Top of Digital Europe, ICT think tank for the Baltic Sea Region, has today released State of the Digital Region 2017: Exploring Automation, Education and Learning in the Baltic Sea Region. The report is the region’s most comprehensive overview of how the countries in the BSR, often ranked as…

The Political State of Region Report was the focus of debate at Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Public Science on Thursday 16th November. Amongst participants were 25 students, teachers and diplomats to whom the 2017 Political State of the Region: External Earthquakes, Internal Adaptation? Brexit, Trump and the Baltic Sea Report was presented by co-author Agnieszka Lada of Warsaw University….

On 25 October BDF organized a workshop together with Union of Baltic Cities (UBC) at the UBC Annual Conference in Växjö, Sweden. The aim was to inspire cities in their work with start-up communities and digitalisation and to inspire new city-to-city collaborations across borders. The State of the Digital Region 2016 report from Top of Digital Europe set the stage with…

BDF´s founder, honorary chairman, and former Danish minister for foreign affairs Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, has published a new book about his life after Danish politics. The book was introduced at a reception hosted by BDF on 26th October. BDF chairman Lene Espersen greeted guests and friends of BDF as Uffe Ellemann-Jensen looked back on key issues that he has continued to…

Baltic Development Forum took part in the XVI All-Russia Forum “Strategic Planning in the Regions and Cities of Russia” in St. Petersburg 23-24 October. This annual event gathered more than one thousand stakeholders from federal, ministerial, regional and local authorities, municipal organisations, international institutions, academia and business. The main objective was to discuss and raise awareness on the ongoing strategic…

How to stay resilient and mitigate vulnerability of our urban areas to the changing climate? How can we be better prepared to meet the challenges with adequate tools and skills to handle different emergency situations? What is direct and indirect impact of climate change on the urban areas? What are the possibilities and constraints to the adaptation? Baltic Development Forum,…

New discussion paper on sharing test beds across borders   Test and demonstration facilities, often named Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs) play a pivotal role for successful commercialization of new digital products and services, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). There seems to be a strong correlation between competitiveness of technology-based SMEs and their access to test beds. However,…