On Thursday and Friday NTNU organized what is called NAV Erfaringskonferanse in Trondheim. Participants from five Norwegian universities and NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) met during presentations and discussions of our ongoing collaboration.
The five universities (NTNU, UiA, UiO, OsloMet, and INN) have separate research collaboration agreements with NAV, and this conference is an opportunity to meet across these separate agreements and discuss long-term research challenges and opportunities. The conference’s first day was about collaborative research and experiences that each of the universities and NAV have had. The second day consisted of presentations of results from ongoing research projects.
On day 1 we had topics that spanned from how NAV is experiencing the cooperation with the universities, to how some researchers experience the cooperation with NAV, but also discussions ranging from action research to innovation, critical thinking, legal aspects of artificial intelligence in NAV, and how to develop research-based practices in NAV.
On day 2 researchers from all universities presented results related to a variety of topics including artificial intelligence, competence development, algorithmic decision-making, front-line workers and collaboration with citizens, agile transformation, and more.
From DigiPub we had several roles. Tangni was in the organizing committee for the conference. Babak was chairing day 1 together with our colleague Marte Daae-Qvale Holmemo from NTNU’s Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management. On day 2 Mortezan and Michaela had presentations from their PhD projects. Morteza talked about collaboration between agile teams and users in NAV. Michaela talked about knowledge sharing between front-line employees such as councilors, and citizens.
This conference is a central arena for us to get in touch with other academics, people from NAV, and get an overview of the research that other universities conduct with NAV. The next conference will be in 2026 in Oslo.
Our participation in this conference was made possible by NTNU-NAV-HMN collaboration program and project SustainDiT.