"Tech and innovation hub" is the label most commonly attached to Trondheim, and like most such labels it's vague enough to mean almost nothing. The specific, verifiable thing Trondheim has is a research pipeline: one very large university, one very large independent research institute sitting inside it, and a documented pattern of globally successful companies that started as research projects rather than startup pitches. Kahoot! — a platform now used by nearly every Fortune 500 company and reaching 1.5 billion users worldwide — is the clearest example, and it began in 2006 as a lecture-hall experiment, not a business plan.
The research base
NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is Trondheim's anchor institution, and SINTEF — the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia — is headquartered directly alongside it, tracing back to 1950 when it was established at what was then the Norwegian Institute of Technology. SINTEF employs around 2,200 people across technology, medicine and social science research, 1,400 of them in Trondheim itself, and ranks among the four largest contract research institutions in Europe. This is not a university with a research institute nearby; it's closer to a single integrated research economy that happens to have both a degree-granting and a commercial-contract arm.
The Kahoot! story, in the detail that usually gets left out
In 2006, NTNU professor Alf Inge Wang started a research project called Lecture Quiz — the idea was to turn a university lecture into something closer to a game show, with students competing on their own devices against material projected on a shared screen. One of Wang's students, Morten Versvik, built his master's thesis on the underlying technology. In 2012, Versvik, Johan Brand and Jamie Brooker turned that research into a company in a joint project with NTNU, working directly with Wang, and were joined by entrepreneur Åsmund Furuseth. Kahoot! launched publicly in 2013 and has since hosted over 14 billion participants. It's now headquartered in Oslo, not Trondheim — the company moved to where the capital, talent pool and Oslo Stock Exchange listing made sense — but the technology, the founding team's formative work, and the original insight all came directly out of an NTNU research project.
That handoff pattern — deep research happening in Trondheim, commercial scaling happening in Oslo — is worth naming explicitly, because it's a genuinely different model from either Rotterdam's port-driven demand or Berlin's startup-culture model in the other series covered here. Trondheim isn't competing to keep every company it produces; its economic role is closer to Eindhoven's relationship with the wider Brainport region in the German-adjacent comparison — the place capability originates, not necessarily the place it stays.
The commercial layer sitting alongside the research
Trondheim's tech economy isn't only research spinouts waiting to move to Oslo. Bekk — a technology and management consultancy founded in Oslo in 2000, now over 600 people — chose Trondheim specifically for its second office rather than treating the city as research-only territory, and runs strategic advisory, systems development and digital-service design work from there for the same kind of large private and public-sector clients it serves from Oslo. That's a genuinely different presence from a research spinout: a mature consultancy betting that Trondheim's talent pool supports ongoing commercial delivery work, not just PhD-adjacent invention.
The buyer
Trondheim's own digital-work buyers split cleanly along the research/industry line. SINTEF and NTNU-adjacent projects are buying and building deeply technical, often EU-grant-funded research software, where the customer is frequently another research institution or an industrial R&D partner rather than a conventional commercial client. The city's smaller commercial tech sector — the spinouts and scaleups that do stay local — buys and sells more conventionally, but competes for the same technical talent the research institutions are training in the first place.
Where the market is under strain
The handoff pattern described above is Trondheim's structural weakness as much as its identity: the city trains and originates capability it doesn't always keep. Kahoot!'s move to Oslo is the highest-profile example, not an outlier, and any local economic strategy that doesn't account for this pattern is planning around a story that isn't actually true.
What this means for anyone selling digital work here
Trondheim rewards genuine research and technical depth — this is not a market where conventional product-agency positioning lands, because a meaningful share of the buyers are themselves deeply technical institutions. The more interesting opportunity is earlier in the pipeline than most agencies think to look: helping a research project become a company is a different, more specialised service than either pure R&D consulting or conventional startup-agency work, and it's underserved precisely because it doesn't fit neatly into either category.
The outlook
Nothing suggests the research base weakens — NTNU and SINTEF's scale is structural, not cyclical. The more interesting question, the same one Eindhoven faces in the German series, is whether Trondheim manages to capture more of the commercial value its own research produces locally, or continues exporting its best outcomes to Oslo as a matter of course.
Sources
- SINTEF — About SINTEF — founding 1950, employee count, Trondheim/Oslo split, European ranking
- Startup Guide — Kahoot startup spotlight, Johan Brand interview — founding story
- NTNU — IDI Impact Case: Kahoot! — Lecture Quiz research project origin, Alf Inge Wang, Morten Versvik's thesis
- Kahoot! — Company History & Key Facts — 2012 founding, 2013 launch, participant totals
- Bekk — Om oss — founding 2000, Oslo and Trondheim offices, headcount (see the Oslo post for full company detail)
Retrieved 2026-08-01.
Caveats and sourcing
This piece is characterisation and market interpretation, not a statistical report.
- Verifiable claims — NTNU and SINTEF's scale and history, the Kahoot! founding timeline and NTNU research origin, and Bekk's Trondheim office are sourced above and cross-confirmed across an NTNU institutional source and independent press coverage.
- The Eindhoven/Brainport comparison is my own analogy, drawn across this writer's own series rather than a claim either region makes about itself — useful as a mental model, not a documented relationship between the two places.
- Characterising claims — the "trains capability it doesn't keep" argument and the underserved-opportunity advice are informed interpretation, not measured findings.
- Deliberately unquantified — no figures are given for how many NTNU/SINTEF-originated companies relocate versus stay in Trondheim; I'm not aware of a dated, named source tracking this and didn't want to imply precision that doesn't exist.