• Know and discuss the concept of smart cities and apply the concept and their specific tools in a real case.
• Identify and critically analyze creative ideas for urban challenges in relation to the pre-selected themes of the course.
• Evaluate the urban challenge and the business ideas identified, using specific characteristics derived from the literature provided in the course.
• Reflect on literature about sustainability, city climate action plans, sources of smart innovation and their evaluation.
• Effectively gather local data in Helsinki and Copenhagen applying the overall knowledge developed in the course in a specific sustainability case.
• Gain experience in finding, evaluating and applying relevant literature to the specific situation of a stakeholder organization.
• Analyze and organize a practical project and integrate multidisciplinary viewpoints.
• Develop and strengthen your creativity, teamwork, project, communication, research, writing, and presentation skills.

The Helsinki-Copenhagen Urban Challenge is offered simultaneously by Copenhagen Business School and Aalto University. Students from both universities spend one and a half weeks together in Helsinki and one and a half weeks in Copenhagen. All students who attend the course are offered a student grant of 275 EURO. The course contents are innovative, practice-oriented and transdisciplinary. Student performance will be assessed according to learning objective specific to their home institutions.

Course Context

The vision of the Helsinki-Copenhagen Smart City Challenge is to create an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional, and cross-cultural learning experience for students, researchers, and practitioners. An increasing number of today’s core innovation approaches to solving urban challenges are defined under the concept of smart cities. A key premise in these innovative approaches is that by collecting and analyzing data and information from the physical environments and inhabitants, it is possible to find solutions toward many sustainability problems and improve people’s everyday lives. Both Copenhagen and Helsinki meet the key requirements for a smart city in a number of ways. There is political vision and willingness to invest and research in smart cities and a strong culture of innovation. Big data is also available for public and private sectors.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is a key issue for smart cities. The Helsinki-Copenhagen Urban Challenge will critically explore the scope and possibilities of the concept on smart cities and the parallels and variety of approaches for how it is being implemented in Helsinki and Copenhagen. It will in particular study the convergence of sector approaches with examples in transport, buildings, energy, street illumination and related smart cities solutions. The course will offer students the opportunity to conduct a comparative examination of cases, stakeholder perspectives, and user and marketing studies with projects targeting private sector partnerships and government opportunities addressing specific sustainability problems in these two cities.

Course description

The course will consist of interactive lectures following a number of interrelated tasks. The overall task will be to make a comparative analysis of the scope and practical ways in which Helsinki and Copenhagen are advancing their goals representing smart cities. Typical areas addressed by local stakeholders with smart city approaches deal with transport, energy and built environment. In practice, this means among other things, building energy use, smart metering, illumination, mobility, parking and accessibility. The students will acquaint themselves with sustainability planning and the administrative context of both cities, and with the role of smart city solutions in the development of new residential areas. The students will engage with a number of interrelated smart city questions intended to develop a critical overview of the multiple interrelations discussing the larger context of smart cities to gain insights into questions like the potential impacts of smart solutions on consumer privacy, and how automatization may impact mobility and urban living more generally.

Course structure

The Helsinki-Copenhagen Urban Challenge proceeds during three weeks, including one and a half weeks of exchange in Copenhagen followed by a similar period in Helsinki. The stay in Helsinki and Copenhagen is structured through lectures, company and site visits, group and field work, and project presentation. With the group work, students work on the specific course task for the duration of the course ending in the production of a group presentation to discuss the case in a smart city analysis light and providing exploration of creative possibilities. This presentation will be due at the end of the three-week period. The groups will consist of cross-institutional teams. Each student will hand in a final individual report due one week after the course.

Participants are responsible for their own travel arrangements. However, we do provide a student travelling grant of 275 EURO per student.

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