To expand the business cooperation and learn about public procurements in Norway, 16 innovative companies from ICT, smart health, smart city and green economy sector from Estonia, Spain (Catalonia), Belgium (Flanders) and Croatia visited Oslo during Oslo Innovation week on 28-29th September.
Oslo innovation week was a crazy week with over 150 event organisers hosting over 80 events (and we are proud to be an organizer of one event ourselves!) that enriched Oslo Innovation Week 2023 and brought together relevant and important people to play a leading role in helping build and highlight Oslo as a destination for growth and investment.
The main aim of our delegation was to learn about opportunities and challenges in public procurements in Norway – we kicked off with an informative session with several speakers and panel discussion on entering Norwegian market and participating in tenders. The speakers included Else Berit Eikeland, former Ambassador to Estonia, who explained about the core values in Norway (trust, openness, equality, and equal rights) and Norwegian business culture and Bjørn Hembre from Lomi agency, who helped us to understand buyer motivations and the competitive landscape in Norway’s public procurement sphere, as well as how to build meaningful relationships and align offerings with buyer’s needs for future success. We also had a chance to get some tips from East CCI of Norway on how to participate in the tenders. In the following panel discussion Estonian-Norwegian Chamber of Commerce and Estonian IT company Helmes participated, where Deniss Ojastu, Head of Software Development and Data Analytics Area of Helmes shared his experience in Norwegian public procurements and suggested to involve a local partner, as well as to invite the partner to visit your country and company to build the relationships.
Workshop by Inventura experts, leading specialists in procurement and value chain optimization in Norway, gave our participants insights to the Norwegian market, concrete tips and tricks for tendering their respective products and services.
Seminar and workshop were followed by networking with foreign and Norwegian companies.
On the second day of our visit, we had a chance to visit two places to get even better understanding of public procurements in Norway from the contracting authority’s side: Climate Agency and Oslo Science Park. Both visits were appreciated by our delegation, as being very practical in terms of showing where public procurements in Norway are heading to.
The Climate Agency was founded in 2016, they are now around 50 people working with climate related tasks to achieve Oslo’s climate goals. To do this they work together with businesses, organizations, and residents to raise awareness and engage the community in climate action. The city of Oslo has since 2016 had a very ambitious climate target, to cut their direct emissions with 95% by 2030. Ambitious, but it is achievable. To achieve this target, they have developed a new climate strategy. This means they have a common framework for all the activities within the city, mapping the direction until 2030. Other important tools are the procurement strategy (highlights that the work on becoming a zero emission city is to be included in all procurements) and the climate budget (sets a target and measures for greenhouse gas emissions reductions each year).
Second visit was to Oslo Science Park, one of the first science parks in Europe. Today more than 300 companies and 3000 people have their daily workplace in the park. Many companies are born and raised here during the last 30 years, like Chipcon, Kelkoo, KappaBio Science, Zwipe, Affitech, Genomar, Taskon, AIMS Technology, Filmgrail, Ardoq, DragonBox etc.
Our delegation got an overview of Procurement Strategy of University of Oslo and their innovative approach to procurement criteria, illustrated by a case study of sustainable catering tender. So, what was so innovative about it? First, the importance of market and user dialog in the preparation process, but most importantly, lowering the threshold for bidders and evaluating 100% on quality criteria, which all lead to new way of contract and order (keyword here being design thinking) and establishing sustainable contract terms.
The mission was organized under the EU funded project GOOSE by 4 project partners Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Flanders Investment & Trade (FIT), Catalonia trade and investment (ACCIÓ), Croatian Employers’ Association, in collaboration with Enterprise Estonia.
We thank all the companies, speakers and organizers who took part of this trip!
Companies who took part of the delegation:
BELGIUM (Flanders):
1. Tokheim Belgium – green economy – provides EV & hydrogen systems
2. Haelvoet – smart health – medical furniture for hospitals and home care; patient monitoring through “e-connected” beds.
3. Prodata Systems – smart city – automatic fare collection systems for all modes of public transport.
CROATIA:
1. Netgen – ICT/Software – building complex websites, online shops and applications from UX research and UX design to implementation and maintenance/support
2. Profico – ICT – a digital agency in the green tech and smart city industry.
- Ingra– smart building – civil engineering projects, utility infrastructure construction projects, building construction projects, energy projects, real estate. ESTONIA:1. Helmes – ICT/Software – custom software development services, including system integration, mobile app development, data services, UI/UX design for medium-to-large information systems
2. Industry 62 – ICT/software/smart health – service-providing agency, currently working on about ten substantial software products, business analytics systems, geographic information systems (GIS), and web-based operating systems
3. Rethink – ICT/software: Rethink helps to build and launch research based digital solutions. We cover all steps from research, analysis, UX/UI design, development to marketing. Our clients include startups, corporations as well as public sector organizations. We are experienced in fintech, technology, medicine and energy sectors.
4. Gofore – ICT/software – Consultancy services from strategic advisory and project management,
through design, development, and deployment of required bespoke software and cloud services with data analytics and AI, to automated testing and continuous operation of the solutions.
5. Trinidad Wiseman – ICT – leading Estonian UX/UI design and service design-focused IT development company, Web and info systems development; business process & system analysis; interaction, BI, AI and Machine learning solutions
6. Future Dialog – smart city – Local municipality communications mobile app for connecting communities and placing people in the centre of local governance - Cognuse– smart health – software solutions for critical disease management and rehabilitation. SPAIN (CATALONIA):1. Upandbike – smart city, smart mobility – A solution to store bicycles in a fully automatic way and at height + app
2. Urbiotica – smart city, smart mobility – Outdoor parking sensors and camera-based occupancy solutions. Software for enforcement and curb management.
3. Witeklab – smart city, smart building – IoT solutions for infrastructure construction and maintenance.