Svein began as Managing Director of Nordic Innovation in 2017. Before that, he held various positions in Innovation Norway, including Senior Vice President and Regional Director.

Svein has also been CEO of The Norwegian Seafood Council and an Advisor in the Norwegian Ministry for Local Government. He holds a master’s degree in economics from The University of Oslo.

William Fulton is the Director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. He is a former Mayor of Ventura, California, and Director of planning & economic development for the city of San Diego.

Since arriving at the Kinder Institute in 2014, Fulton has overseen a tripling of the Institute’s size and budget. He is the author of six books, including Guide to California Planning, the standard urban planning textbook in California, and The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, which was an L.A. Times best-seller. His most recent book is Talk City: A Chronicle Of Political Life In An All-American Town. He currently serves as board chair for Metro Lab Network, a national network of research partnerships between cities and universities, and vice chair of LINK Houston, a transportation equity advocacy group. Fulton holds master’s degrees in mass communication from The American University and urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jeanne Holm is the Deputy Mayor for Budget and Innovation of the City of Los Angeles, addressing issues of technology, equity, digital inclusion, and fiscal transparency. She connects public-private partners for innovations ranging from improving digital equity to using data science for environmental justice to reimagining government work.She founded the Data Science Federation partnering universities and cities to create innovative solutions such as using artificial intelligence for traffic safety and machine learning to improve air quality.

She was formerly the Evangelist for open data for the White House under President Obama, the leader for Africa open data for the World Bank, and the Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA.

She is a Distinguished Instructor at UCLA, a Trustee of Claremont Graduate University, a Fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics, on the Global Leadership Board for Time’s Up, and an advisor to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

She leads a startup that promotes equity, education, and social justice through technology and education programs for innovators throughout the world.

Mr. Rantanen is the Executive Director, City of Tampere, for growth, innovation and competitiveness. He is responsible for the City of Tampere Smart City programme and other major city development programmes.

Teppo worked for Deloitte between 2002 – 2016, the last two years in London as a member of Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications leadership team, before that as CEO of Deloitte Finland for 12 years. Prior to joining Deloitte, Teppo was Nordic Leader for Andersen Risk Consulting.

Jennifer brings 20 years of renewable energy and clean tech experience in industry, non-profit, government and research environments. She is the Director for Blue Economy at DNV, Energy and Maritime – North America. She also serves as the Project Director for Washington Maritime Blue, a newly formed cluster organization for maritime innovation and sustainability. Her focus areas include port and maritime innovation and decarbonization projects; such as electrification and alternative fuels for vessels, as well as shoreside renewable energy, storage and microgrids.

Her experience includes work at DNV, Port of Port Angeles, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, managing a wind development company, as well as serving as City Councilor for Sequim, WA. Her greatest accomplishments include launch and leadership for Washington Maritime Blue, launching a start-up in carbon fiber recycling, implementation of key renewable energy policy, and driving development of clean energy projects.

She is working to create cross-sector and cross-organization collaboration opportunities to advance the Blue Economy. In 2020, she was asked to testify in Congress on new structures to support cross-cutting Energy and Maritime commercialization activities. She is helping to lead the UN Sustainable Ocean Business Action Platform sprint on Harnessing Ocean Energy. For Washington Maritime Blue, she leads stakeholder engagement, joint innovation projects, as well as development of the Blue Economy strategic plan for the Washington State Department of Commerce.

Kim has a background with Urban development in Denmark and Urban Management in the Netherlands. The last five years he has worked with smart city strategies and smart city initiatives for the City of Copenhagen in Copenhagen Solutions Lab. Kim combines his experience from previous jobs into transforming the smart city visions and strategies of Copenhagen into real solutions. Kim is, among other things, member of the board for the Danish smart city network for organizations in Denmark and is also founding partner and chairman of the Nordic Smart City Network with 20 Nordic Cities.

Gunnar Edwin Crawford is head of Stavanger Smart City, innovating across public-private boundaries, co-creating the smart city of the future.

Gunnar has extensive hands-on experience with innovation and development within the fields of welfare technology, smart homes and smart cities.

He believes strongly in citizen involvement and uses the power of the smart city team to challenge and evolve the democratic processes of today.

He is a patent holder, and winner of a CES Innovation award. He has contributed in several EU projects, including two Horizon 2020 projects – Triangulum (www.triangulum-project.eu) and Invade (http://h2020invade.eu/).

Crawford’s professional background is within ICT, energy and innovation. Gunnar is co-author of the book “Creating Disruptive Ecosystems” (2016 – http://www.disruptiveecosystems.com/ ), about the importance of understanding new digital business models when innovating digital systems and services.

Trond Thorbjørnsen is a Senior Business developer at the Innovation R&D department at Lyse, which is a regional multi utility company owned by 14 municipalities in the Stavanger region. Trond has long experience leading early stage technology and development projects at Lyse. Trond has extensive hands-on experience with innovation and development in welfare technology and smart homes as well as services on top of energy and smart city infrastructure. He has contributed in several EU projects, including two Horizon 2020 projects – Triangulum (www.triangulum-project.eu) and INVADE (http://h2020invade.eu/).

Tronds`s professional background is within smart home, energy and innovation.

Trond is the inventor of “Badetassen” and the Light pole charging solution tested in the municipality of Stavanger.

Mobility and concept developer graduated from Norwegian Business School BI and the Royal Navy. Over 20 years of experience from marketing, advertising, media, sales, management, mobility, product and business development. The last five years co-creating award winning mobility solutions in Norway, and also co-founder of a soon-to-be-world-famous tech startup 😉  Defines himself as a flexilist; uses various mobility solutions, normally walking, city e-bike and trains, and have a Care by Volvo-membership.

Maria is passionate about IoT and innovation, and it is her interest in digitalisation that has brought her to work with the City of Stockholm and smart city projects.

She has worked with the city since 2017 at the executive office and has been part of Stockholm’s smart city program as manager of the project Smart and connected lighting. She is now heading IoT Stockholm, the project that will finalise and implement the city’s IoT platform.

Thord Swedenhammar is deputy CEO at Stokab in Stockholm, Sweden’s largest dark fibre network.

Thord has extensive experience as a public servant. His recent role was as Head of Mayor’s Office, responsible for strategic political planning within the City of Stockholm. Thord also has experience as a communications and public affairs consultant with a focus on urban development.

Anna Chiara joined Qamcom in 2020 as Project Manager. Prior to this, she spent over six years working with innovation and technology development both in the private and public sector. Besides creating a better future by means of innovation, Anna Chiara is really passionate about storytelling and sustainability.

Kerkko Vanhanen is the Programme Director for Smart City Kalasatama Helsinki. He works for Forum Virium Helsinki, an innovation company owned by the City of Helsinki. Before Kerkko has worked as CEO for Traficon Ltd – A traffic planning and consulting company – and for Helsinki Region Transport (public transport authority) as the Head of Information Systems Group leading all development projects around digital passenger information and open data.

Kerkko’s special competence is in smart mobility and digital service design around mobility. He has strong interest also in smart energy solutions and generally in any innovation that makes urban life easier and causes less negative impacts on nature. Kerkko has M.Sc. in Civil Engineering (Aalto University, former Helsinki University of Technology) and he has also studied minor in the department of architecture about Urban Planning.

Maarit Kahila-Tani has her background in planning geography from University of Helsinki and urban planning from Aalto University. Her research focused on new methods for enabling and encouraging wider public participation. In her dissertation, she studied the opportunities for urban planners to take advantage of map-based PPGIS tools like Maptionnaire to get ideas and insights from residents. (Short link: mpt.link/maarit_dissertation)

Currently she is the CEO and co-founder of Mapita, the company behind Maptionnaire. She continues to work in the domain of community engagement tools for urban planners and city developers. Maptionnaire is a powerful community engagement tool that helps urban planners and city developers to create map-based tools to get ideas and insights from residents – thus enabling and encouraging public participation. Currently Maptionnaire is a global SaaS service
used in over 35 countries.

Jarkko Sireeni is CEO and Founder of xD Visuals Oy, the developer of xD Twin, a
digital twin solution for cities and projects (https://www.xd-twin.io/). He is also the chair of the city planning group in buildingSMART Finland. Jarkko has 29 years of experience in BIM, VDC, VR, AR and visualization in planning, design, and construction of urban development projects.

Nikolai Astrup was appointed Minister of Local Government and Modernization in January 2020, after having been Minister of Digitization and before that Minister of Development. He is a member of the UN Secretary – General’s High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. He has a master’s degree in European Politics and Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been elected as a parliamentary representative, and has previously been the leader of the Oslo Conservative Party and editor-in-chief of the magazine Minerva.