Oslo's post-Covid competitiveness

The digital acceleration is pivotal to how top cities and regions adjust to COVID-19. With working-from-home, more restricted movement, fewer commutes and less travel, digital has emerged not only as the enabler of major lifestyle changes, but also as an accelerator of the emergence of new industries and as a lifeline for social cohesion.

A key task for Oslo will be to translate this into a positive new normal, one where governments and individuals no longer think about ‘digital’ as something separate, but take seriously how the city is now ‘blended’ and how this in turn creates new opportunities and risks to Oslo’s competitiveness.

In a post-Covid world, gaps will open up between cities that see digital simply as a driver of remote working and a threat to city centres, and those who see it as part of a much wider hybrid future for the city, and so use digital as a tool for enhancing public trust, improving how government operates, supporting a culture of entrepreneurship, and raising productivity of people and land.
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How well will Oslo ‘blends’ the physical and the digital will be essential both to its success, and to its long-term appeal among prospective visitors, residents, investors and entrepreneurs.

The move to the hybrid city has the potential to amplify Oslo’s leadership on key agendas of sustainability and wellbeing. More emphasis than ever before is being placed on generating, collecting and evaluating citizen data, and using this to guide better decisions in our cities in support of public health and planetary sustainability.96 The pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to listen to the needs of citizens in how services are delivered and to build deeper partnerships between the public and private sector.

But the rapid acceleration of digital in our lives also means that Oslo will need to be vigilant to make sure Oslo is superbly connected, communicating to the outside world in new ways, finding the right balance to foster the data economy, and ensuring governments and institutions embrace technology to improve how they work. Oslo’s push for attracting more specialist international talent, innovators and entrepreneurs will depend on addressing these imperatives head-on.

How is Oslo’s digital innovation doing?

Digital competitiveness will be crucial to the success of Oslo’s companies, start-ups and institutions.104 The latest evidence suggests that up to 85% of leading firms have accelerated digitisation since the pandemic hit, including through increased adoption of automation and AI. Cities are becoming known as digital ready, or digital unready. Businesses and talent will gravitate to those places where the adjustment is seamless and where the whole larger region is digitally as well as physically connected.

The early signs are that Oslo's digital economy – the companies and sectors where digital capability is fundamental to their edge - has really accelerated through Covid-19 and has great momentum and potential to develop further. Ongoing efforts to diversify the economy and grow the number of digital and tech-oriented firms, together with the Covid-19 pandemic, have spurred many Oslo-based digital firms to attract global attention and recognition. These include the secure Norwegian video conferencing company Pexip, a rival to zoom, and the new AI platform Exabel, which recently won 1 of 5 places for fintechs through the Investment Association’s innovation hub. By summer 2020, Oslo’s innovative businesses had one of the highest levels of specialisation in sectors allied to digital technologies across smaller and medium-sized peers (see Figure 22).

Can Oslo ensure a more seamless experience for visitors and residents?

Data and digitisation are fast emerging as a means of making urban destinations more compelling, visible and accessible. Accelerated digitisation will place a premium on destinations that provide enriched and meaningful experiences that cannot be replicated online. Digital will be a key enabler of agility, specificity and consumer confidence among urban dwellers. The appetite for a digital future will continue into a post-COVID world, adding urgency to the imperative for regions like Oslo to mainstream the use of data and digital tools in industries such as retail, hospitality and leisure.

The global comparative evidence suggests that Oslo’s ability to stay relevant and grow its appeal to the next generation of consumers will depend on scaling efforts to re-imagine its retail stores and accelerate the integration of digital tools in cultural settings. A global survey undertaken before the pandemic hit showed Oslo ranked 20th among its 28 peers for resident perceptions of the impact of digital purchasing and booking options on the seamlessness of cultural attendance and participation.121

The latest data also shows that relative to its size, Oslo is behind for innovation specialisation in sectors allied to the future of retail, hospitality and leisure. As of the start of 2021, Oslo ranks 27th among 29 peers for the number of innovative tech firm HQs specialising in these sectors, with more than 25% fewer such firm HQs per resident compared to on average among its peer group.122 Looking to the future, Oslo can accelerate efforts to re-imagine stores and cultural spaces in order to create more immersive and distinctive experiences for customers and users, as has recently been done in Oslo’s Moniker store on the city’s high-end shopping street Bogstadveien.