Edinburgh Napier University is the lead academic partner for the Smart Cities project and leads the project's academic network. This network includes a number of academic partners (Edinburgh Napier University, MEMORI, and UAS Oldenburg), one commercial partner (Porism Ltd.) and several associate partners (Agder University, Groningen University, and Karlstad University) from across the North Sea Region.

The network’s principal role is to offer hands-on support to the government partners, to qualify good practices and to accurately translate the pilots into transferable good practice, white papers and methodologies.
Edinburgh Napier University is one of the top ten universities in the UK for graduate employability, and with 15,000 students from over 100 countries we are one of the largest higher education institutions in Scotland. We are focussed on undertaking research which is directly relevant to supporting sustainable economic growth in Scotland and in other countries. We are also leaders in the transfer of knowledge from our applied fields of research, to industry and commerce at both at home and abroad.

As lead academic partner, our role is:
To bring academics and municipalities from across the North Sea Region together to support the development of local pilots by doing joint work and exchanging knowledge.
To support the management and delivery of the project through developing the Smart Cities wiki, an online collaborative environment for project partners.
To identify good practice inside the project by developing project wide monitoring and evaluation tools for local pilots.
To identify relevant good practice from outside the project – e.g. by identifying relevant cases on epractice.eu and by identifying lessons from other relevant projects (EQUAL, LUDA, SURegen etc.).
To develop and deliver an evaluation programme for the project that covers formative and summative evaluations.
To disseminate SCRAN outputs/research findings etc. via the epractice.eu network (DG Info), academic publications and briefings.

Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
www.napier.ac.uk