Welfare technology has increasingly been on both the political and media agenda during the last five to seven years. Yet despite this great interest and intensive hype, perhaps not as many new solutions have been implemented as might have been expected.

The over 1,200 Nordic municipalities have faced challenges in transforming interest and projects into implemented solutions and innovative new everyday lives for staff and citizens.

This publication, and the CONNECT project overall, addresses some of the problems faced by the Nordic municipalities in their work with welfare technology: How can we capitalise more on our projects? How do we ensure that the knowledge we gather is integrated in the municipal organisation? How can we become better at sharing our knowledge and experience, rather than thinking that we each need to reinvent the wheel? How can we strengthen the joint Nordic market for welfare technology? How do we ensure that staff see technology as a co-player?

The issues to be tackled are numerous and complicated. CONNECT gathers these threads to create the first complete Nordic toolbox for how municipalities can work with welfare technology on the best possible basis. Yet the toolbox is not just the advice given by experts, but is also based on practical experience and municipal ”best practice”, as it is created by ten of the Nordic region’s leading municipalities in the welfare technology area, in cooperation with a number of national authorities.

Nordic Welfare Centre hopes that this publication and this toolbox can help to promote welfare technology initiatives in the respective countries, and also to promote cooperation across national borders in the Nordic region.We hope that you will find both the toolbox and the publication useful.