The Stockholm Challenge Award is a non-profit initiative of the City of Stockholm in partnership with the European Commission. It offers IT pioneers from around the world a unique opportunity to showcase projects of excellence, which can be private, public, academic or non-profit.

As you probably know, the Stockholm Challenge Award is the successor to the Global Bangemann Challenge - the successful IT award that attracted international participation and recognition from 1997 to 1999.

You may be wondering why the City of Stockholm decided to start this initiative. Well, let's go back to 1993 when Sweden was about to enter the European Union. The main question at City Hall was: "How do we introduce Stockholm to the rest of Europe?"

Stockholm was even then heavily dominated by the IT and telecom industry, and the city itself a pioneer in using new information tools. At that time, the EU Commissioner responsible for IT, Dr. Martin Bangemann, was concerned that Europe was lagging behind the US when it came to IT. In the report Europe's way to the Information Society (better known as the Bangemann report), he pointed out ten areas in which Europe had to improve in order to catch up with the US.

An idea began to take shape at City Hall: Let's challenge the other European cities in these ten areas! The aim was to identify the best IT project in each category and then learn from these individuals, cities or regions - thereby moving faster towards the goals Dr. Bangemann had set out in his report.

From the very start, it was the sharing of knowledge and brokering of contacts that created the spirit of the Challenge. Over 100 IT projects from 25 European cities took part in the first Challenge. In January 1997, the Bangemann Challenge culminated with an awards ceremony in the Blue Hall in Stockholm, where His Majesty, King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden gave prizes to the winning projects.

Pioneers from competing projects, participating cities and regions, and the European Commission wanted to keep the spirit of the Challenge alive. So, they urged the City of Stockholm to continue the Challenge and, by doing so, stimulate the vital sharing of knowledge. With this in mind, the City of Stockholm once again took on the task of launching a Challenge - this time on a global scale.

This is how the Global Bangemann Challenge was born; once again, it was a challenge for cities and regions around the world to show their best IT projects. The ten original areas grew into eleven categories and an international jury of senior experts was formed.

Over a period of two and a half years, 700 IT projects from more than 250 cities and 60 countries entered the Challenge and embraced the spirit of sharing. They also benefited themselves from the attention they got from the global community. In June 1999, the City of Stockholm repeated the tradition of an awards ceremony in the Blue Hall, in the presence of His Majesty, King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden.

That night, before the last trumpet announced the winners of the Global Bangemann Challenge, the Mayor of Stockholm was once more urged to continue the Challenge. It was clear to all that the process and vision of the Challenge were too valuable to be lost. What started off as an idea of how Stockholm could introduce itself to the rest of Europe, had now grown into a global initiative that turned out to be invaluable to the pioneers of the digital age world-wide.