TechRadar Pro heads to Oslo to find out why Norway can be the biggest Scandinavian success story yet.

When it comes to the latest big tech breakthroughs, many people would think of California, Singapore or China as the world’s top locations for vibrant start-ups.

Norway’s economy has traditionally focused around the sea, with oil, gas and fishing among its most famous industries. However as the world gradually comes round to realising these resources are somewhat finite, many Norwegians are instead turning to technology to make their fortune.

TechRadar Pro headed to the land of ice and snow (aka Oslo) to speak to some of the country’s top start-ups and investment firms to find out just how close Norway is to being the next big technology success story.

To begin with, that last sentence may have been somewhat of a misnomer. Norway has had several major technology successes in recent years, including the likes of Kahoot, Vivaldi, and probably the most notable, Opera Software.

Former Opera vice president and chief commercial officer Rolf Assev quit the company after 12 years service in the corporate world, and now helps head up Oslo’s StartupLab, a dedicated space for fledgling Norwegian firms to grow and prosper.

“When we started six years ago, no one believed in us, because no one believed you could make money of early stage tech start-ups,” he tells TechRadar Pro at StartupLab headquarters, on the campus of Oslo’s main university.

“People believe we have never done start-ups in Norway…but we have!”

At first glance, StartupLab seems similar to the many start-up accelerators found in San Francisco or around London’s Silicon Roundabout. Teams of four or five sit around wheeled wooden desks (to ensure easy movement around the floor) or huddle round screens, talking excitedly in meeting rooms.

However Assev explains that behind the calm facade, the selection process is extremely tough as the Norwegian technology scene continues to develop. StartupLab accepts only one in every 10 applicants it receives, he reveals, meaning that competition is fierce to get in.

Assev explains that although Sweden has traditionally been Scandinavia’s leading technology hub, Norway is fast catching up. The traditional levels of investment pushed into the west coast of the country, home to the fishing and utility industries, is now instead being focused inland to the cities – offering a great opportunity for tech start-ups.

For StartupLab, it is often the founders themselves that make companies an attractive proposition, Assev says. He highlights Magnus Wanberg, the CEO of reMarkable, an e-screen company that had to take on the likes of Samsung and Google, and Karen Dolva, founder of No Isolation, which builds robot companions for the elderly and children with learning difficulties, as proof that investing in people who believe in their ideas (and plan for the long term) can be the key for success.

“We believe in the founders,” he notes, “we believe they are the best people to find out where a company is going.”

Businesses, especially start-ups, in other countries often fall victim to a model of rapid initial growth, before being sold or amalgamated into larger companies, Assev says. However in Norway, thanks to much of the investment into start-ups coming from within the country, rather than from abroad, domestic companies are able to keep their independence, and grow organically to achieve greater levels of success.

“There is no one doing the same model that we are doing,” he adds, “we did this not to make money, but to give back.”

“We don’t know what the next steps are just yet – we just know we want to have global successes…and be the place for the best start-ups in Norway.”

Over in Oslo’s picturesque old town, a snowball’s throw from the ornate 17th century cathedral, another organisation is looking to encourage the next generation of Norwegian tech start-ups to break into the big time.

Tharald Nustad and Anders Lier head up Nordic Impact, an angel investment firm that looks to back technology start-ups that are able to do good for the planet.

Scandinavia, and Norway in particular, is well-placed to push this agenda, having long been a key location for new technology fields – from green energy to electric vehicles

Lier, Nordic Impact’s executive chairman, notes that technology can “lift the country out of the oil dopmaine, into the new world,” with banks, cities, universities and corporate machines all working together to help support a vibrant Norwegian start-up scene.

Lier notes that the dawn of a new “unicorn economy” could be coming to Norway within the next few years – one with the potential to rival the oil boom of the 1970s, which has helped transform the country into the model for progress it is now.

“It’s the right time for Norway to leave the oil industry,” he says, “we need to find a new future.”

“We think more of the learning society – being smart doesn’t mean you do the right stuff.”

Lier notes that Norway is able to benefit not just from abundant natural resources, but thanks to its oil wealth, can enjoy national cash reserves of around £1 billion – which he believes could be invested into technology.

However Nordic Impact is not just focused on the next big thing or technology trend however, as the company looks to instead solve the big issues facing modern society within the next few decades.

“Looking from above, the question is what is the future of society?” Lier notes, “We don’t really know, but it will be a world of abundance.”

With less than five thousand working days left until 2030, the need for ituitive, intelligent technologies is becoming more pressing by the day, and this requires new, non-linear business models – such as that provided by Nordic Impact.

“We are optimistic about the future,” he adds, “but we can’t just leave it to the technology…we have to be on top of it.”

“We have the DNA to take risks.”

Along with innovation though, collaboration is the key to ensuring humanity benefits from the boost technology can bring.

Nustad, a serial tech entrepreneur and the founder of Nordic Impact, notes how new technology has helped bring people together over the past decades, but adds that physical interaction is important as ensuring we use the latest tools.

Lier again references No Isolation as an example of the good work their investment has helped fund, and states that success will come not just from good technology or good business processes, but how companies work with the communities that surround them.

“There shouldn’t be any competition to try and save the world,” he observes.

The firm now looks to encourage investment in Norway through its own efforts. This May, it is set to host the Katapult Future Fest in Oslo to show off both the good work done by its existing benficiaries, and highlight the potential of both the city and Norway as a whole to investors both at home and around the world.

“Those in the know, know Norway,” Lier notes.

Ultimately, it seems that the excitement around Norway’s technology scene is well-placed. A young city, open to new ideas, and ready to benefit from a wealth investment – all of this seems to contribute towards the recipe for a success story. The future of the world when it comes to technology may well be found in Scandinavia, with Norway right at the heart of the action.

(techradar)

Container ships, tankers, freighters, and cruise liners are a significant source of CO2 emissions and other pollutants. Led by Norway, Europe is beginning to electrify its coastal vessels – but the task of greening the high seas fleet is far more daunting.

Since early 2015, a mid-sized car ferry, the MS Ampere, has been traversing the Sognefjord in western Norway from early morning to evening, seven days a week — without a whiff of smokestack exhaust or a decibel of engine roar. The 260-foot Ampere, which carries 120 cars and 360 passengers, is the one of world’s first modern, electric-powered commercial ships, with battery and motor technology almost identical to today’s plug-in electric cars, only on a much larger scale.

Norway’s long and jagged Atlantic coastline — with thousands of islands and deep inland fjords — made the Norwegians a seafaring people long ago, and even today ferry travel is the fastest way to reach many destinations. Given this geography and the country’s abundant hydroelectric resources, it’s hardly surprising that the Norwegians have plunged ahead in the development of electric shipping, beginning with light, short-range ferries.

Currently, Norway has just two fully operational electric-powered ferries. But another 10 will be christened this year, 60 by 2021, and by 2023 the country’s entire ferry fleet will either be all-electric or, for the longer routes, equipped with hybrid technology, experts say. Moreover, Norway’s top cruise ship operator will soon launch two expedition cruise liners with hybrid propulsion that are designed to sail the Arctic. Several Norwegian companies have teamed up to construct a coastal, all-electric container ship that could eliminate 40,000 diesel truck trips annually. Eidesvik Offshore, a firm supplying offshore oil rigs, has converted a supply vessel to operate on batteries, diesel, and liquefied natural gas.

Snøhetta’s House to Die In has become one of the most buzzed-about architectural proposals in recent years. Find out how it came to life, and why the controversy cuts so deep into Norwegian culture.

The sun is setting fast over a half-frozen hill about five miles west of Oslo. Named Kikkut after a now-demolished villa, the site neighbors Ekely, the old estate of Edvard Munch (itself now half razed), and save for some graffiti-covered detritus and an early crop of spring wildflowers, its peak is totally barren. Squinting northward to Munch’s Winter Atelier some 500 feet in the distance, it’s hard to believe this is the proposed site for A House to Die In: one of the most controversial building proposals in recent Norwegian history.

The brainchild of Norway’s enfant terrible artist Bjarne Melgaard, the proposal for “A House to Die In” is a luminescent, UFO-like living sculpture that doubles as a studio and home for Melgaard and his parents. With financial backing from two of the most powerful property developers in the country, the Selvaags and Sealbay A/S—longterm friends of the artist who also supplied the plot of land on the outskirts of the city—the Oslo-based Melgaard approached local Norwegian firm Snøhetta in 2011 with his idea for a combined artwork, studio—and final resting place.

With its ambiguous forms and incorporation of landscape, Snøhetta’s work has often betrayed a penchant for the weird and whimsical. It’s little surprise, then, that the architects found a perfect match in Melgaard’s notoriously saucy and controversial practice: an ever-growing list of scandals that includes a 2014 sculpture dubbed the “racist chair” by news outlets, and an ongoing project titled The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment, in which Melgaard appropriates the aesthetics of Narcotics Anonymous to critique celebrity and fashion culture (even taking a dig at Rihanna in 2017).

Perhaps equally unsurprising, Melgaard’s signature paper trail of negative press has followed “A House to Die In,” lobbying criticisms which architects from Snøhetta say are largely unfounded. “It’s shocking to read these reports of the project from journalists who haven’t engaged with us or Melgaard at all,” marvels the project architect Martin Brunner, on a recent afternoon in Snøhetta’s offices in central Oslo.

“Many suggest we are building directly upon Munch’s estate, or just next to his property, when in fact the site for the House is across the road and over 500 feet away,” adds the second project architect Jenny Osuldsen, who came on board in 2013 following the proposal’s first rejection at the national level. “The so-called ‘facts’ are all made up. It’s literally fake news,” she insists.

A trio of models in Snøhetta’s office are evidence of the nearly decade-long engagement between architects and artist; only one of them looks anything like the initial renderings. Although the project architect Martin Brunner admits to serving “like Melgaard’s secretary” at times, he regards the otherwise collaborative process as an immeasurably valuable lesson in architectural synesthesia. “All of our standard procedures and tools had to be reconsidered,” says Osuldsen, “We were basically interpreting Melgaard’s work like musicians.”

Working closely with the opinionated artist, Brunner and Osuldsen were forced to re-think their design approach, which had at first consisted of translating Melgaard’s sketches into three dimensions in Rhino—deemed by the latter as too obvious a solution. They slowly developed a more iterative procedure conveyed in a series of dizzying, a posteriori tapestry-like diagram charts that track the movements of ideas. Melgaard’s bullet-point comments within the drawings—”too neat,” “too repetitive”—prompted changes to the house’s silhouette, for example. Snøhetta ultimately arrived at a design that retains about 10 percent of their initial proposal, which involved a house that looked “too much like a house,” according to Melgaard.

Yet they eventually found their groove, with Snøhetta transforming Melgaard’s signature candy-colored stuffed animals into “half Cubist, half teddy bear” columns for the amorphous vessel above.

Before the first year of their partnership was out, the team had a solid design in place. They submitted it to the city municipality for approval: Bingo. They then took a victory leap to the national heritage council, who rejected it “totally without reason,” says Osuldsen. “We had to ask them, ‘Is this about our proposal, or is this actually about not building on the site at all?’”

Yet local press begged to differ, with the Norwegian Morgenbladet blasting the “paranoid and monumental death architecture… a subjective dream world supported by an apparently boundless approach to money,” shortly after the project was exhibited at London’s ICA in 2012.

As they were to soon discover, the reason was buried deep in the cultural memory of the landscape that anchored the House’s design. “We were dealing with a pro bono plot of land with plenty of historical baggage,” explains Osuldsen. “It’s not so simple as just relocating the project, or building it somewhere else. The site and the project have always been seen as one.”

Unfortunately for Snøhetta and Melgaard, that way of thinking is a two-way street. The proposal has been met with opposition from local artists, who, according to Brunner, view the project “as a desecration of holy ground because of its connection to Edvard Munch.”

Things have become heated, even taking the form of ad hominem attacks (including homophobic graffiti slandering Melgaard). But the dissent has largely been civil, with opponents drawing attention to an endangered species of flower recently discovered on the site, which has landed the project back into planning purgatory.

The House’s third and current redesign is a considerably shrunken permutation (even smaller than the original Kikkut Villa demolished 28 years ago) that does not encroach on the public side of the hill, a space which the artist always intended to be public. And despite the convoluted restrictions and huge overhaul of the House’s design, Melgaard and Snøhetta are delighted with its final form, a jagged, crystalline mass of charred timber, complete with glowing engravings and perched on cubist creature-shaped columns. “I don’t want to say the process was a pleasure, but the design has definitely benefited from all the constraints,” Brunner shares with a sly smile. “It’s really matured.”

Melgaard’s whimsical structural figurines, arguably the most endearing part of the final design (and the architects’ own favorite), were once hidden underground in a secret studio space. Now, they emerge from the woodland. It’s a detail that is sure to appeal to students of the elementary school nestled at the base of the hill.

Moving beyond its general silhouette, many of the proposed building’s once inward-facing delights are now extroverted—like Melgaard’s own creaturely etchings upon its burned wooden exterior, which will now be fitted with backlit glass. The intended effect is a sort of tapestry of glowing illustrations whose black background blends into the starry sky above: An astronomical change to the hermetic original design.

Today, the proposed project once again finds itself up against the heritage council. This will be its final lap around, whichever way the cards might fall. Even if Munch “has not—and never—played a role in the process, or Melgaard’s practice,” according to the Snøhetta and Melgaard, who has openly denied an interest in Munch’s legacy—one can’t help but notice the uncanny similarities between the two artists, whose creative visions have always shared an outsider’s space on the fringes of society. Even if A House to Die In seems to cultivate more of a hedonistic crash pad for a contemporary art star than the melancholia of Munch’s frugal tomb, it wouldn’t seem so odd for the artist’s final resting places to converge here, too.

(metropolismag)