As smart city ambitions accelerate across Europe, a critical question is emerging: do local authorities and organizations have the skills to deliver? In Stavanger, professionals from four countries gathered to help answer it — and to shape a strategy that could change how Europe trains its next generation of smart city professionals.
On a sunny morning at Nordic Edge Expo, something quietly historic took place. Norway became the first country in Europe to sit down with the SMARCO project team and have a preview the Skills Strategy for Smart Communities Skills Development — the project’s main output, whose publication is foreseen by the end of May.
The workshop, facilitated by Caterina Bortolaso and Alessandra Buffa from the SMARCO consortium, brought together participants from the public sector, private companies, and academia. Representatives from Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Spain sat around the table — all with one task: give feedback to SMARCO strategy for smart communities skills development.
The skills Europe’s cities need most
Based on the skills needs analysis carried out across Europe, SMARCO identified five areas where the gap between what cities need and what is currently available is widest:
- Digital transformation and AI governance
- Resilience and climate adaptation
- Sustainable resource management
- Governance and co-creation
- Systemic foresight and innovation readiness
These five Priority Skills Areas highlight a significant shift in how Smart Communities are conceived and managed. The findings suggest that future professionals will no longer operate within isolated technical domains, but rather across interconnected ecosystems where digital technologies, sustainability goals, governance models, and social dynamics continuously interact.
The conversation the Blueprint sparked
Caterina and Alessandra set a tone that balanced project information with warmth, working through the harder structural questions without losing the energy of the group. The format moved participants through identifying their own experience of skills challenges and give their reaccommodation to a stakeholder of their choice on how to close it.
One theme cut across every group discussion: communication. Not digital communication tools, or communications strategies — but the basic, human ability to explain complex challenges to politicians, colleagues, and citizens.
– We struggle to make our politicians understand, said one participant, capturing a frustration many in the room clearly shared. “We need to build trust with our citizens. For that, we need communication skills.”
Rebecca Sjølie, one of the participants, put it directly:
– In the era of AI, soft skills are more important than ever.
The groups also identified a structural gap that goes beyond individual skills: the disconnect between strategic leadership and the people actually doing the work. Participants pointed to the need for top management to be more actively involved — not to manage innovation from above, but to translate ambition into action, and to ensure that learnings from projects actually feed back into decision-making.
What the room recommended
The group work produced a set of recommendations that were practical, direct, and in some cases, deliberately provocative:
- Invest in people and take culture seriously. Skills development cannot be separated from organisational culture.
- Support the doers. Not everyone is suited for innovation, and trying to make innovation everyone’s job often means it becomes no one’s job.
- Prioritise diversity — of mindset, age, and background. Homogeneous teams produce homogeneous solutions.
- Close the gap between experts and decision-makers. Put them in the same room. Make them speak the same language.
- Use the city as a sandbox. Create conditions that enable experimentation across sectors — with the right people, in the right places.
- Measure collective impact. Shared indicators and monitoring tools can help stakeholders align around common societal goals and maintain strategic direction over time.
- Invest in lifelong learning ecosystems, not only projects. Continuous upskilling and reskilling pathways are essential to support adaptive organisations and resilient communities.
- Communicate innovation visibly and consistently. Strategic communication and shared narratives help create trust, legitimacy, and engagement around Smart Community initiatives.
What happens next
The feedback gathered in Stavanger will feed directly into the refinement of the Blueprint and Strategy, together with the other nine roundtables taking place across Europe in the next months.
The SMARCO project is ultimately asking a deceptively simple question: what does it take to build a genuinely smart community? The answer, as the workshop in Stavanger made clear, is not just technology or funding. It is people — with the right skills, the right connections, and the space to act.
About Nordic Edge Expo
Nordic Edge Expo is the Nordic cross-sectoral meeting place for smart and sustainable societies. The event is hosted in Stavanger every other year.
This is where leaders, entrepreneurs, decision-makers and capital connect to create new partnerships and actions.
