The first NORA-HS case competition took place Wednesday and Thursday 2-3 September 2026, when 10 NORA-HS students gathered for two long days of mind-twisting, intellectual challenges, group dynamics challenges, and a few surprises brought to the table by the organizers.
The students had no opportunity to prepare for the competition in advance. Their only prior information was that they should go to Oslo. The case itself was kept a secret, and to prevent «case-guessing», the students were not even told until the night before kickoff, where in Oslo the competition would take place.
The night before kickoff they were told to meet up at SIMULA. There, they were greeted by NORA, the organizing committee and the case owners, who presented the case and divided the students into three teams.
The case was developed by Jostein Jensen (SIMULA), Klas Pettersen (SIMULA), Halvdan Gaute Søvik Haugsbakken (HiØ), Arnt Maasø (UiO) and NORA. In the spirit of SIMULA’s focus on AI safety, the case challenged the students to provide strategic advice on how Norway should develop its national capacity for AI safety and security. The task involved identifying specific challenges and risk areas that Norway must address, determining the necessary capabilities, and designing the most effective institutional model given the constraint of an annual budget of 25 million NOK.
This case was to be solved as an interdisciplinary decision-making task, where strong solutions had to effectively connect technical, social science, legal, ethical, economic, and security policy perspectives. The deliverables were a six-page report and a ten-minute presentation aimed at convincing the government of the right safety strategy for Norway.
The three teams consisted of three to four members each, all having different backgrounds and perspectives, requiring everyone to venture somewhat beyond the comfort zones of their respective fields. This was quite challenging, and to make things worse, the power and the internet surprisingly went down and the laptop batteries quickly went flat at exactly 4 PM on the first day of the competition. This didn’t actually happen but we pretended that it did, and pretending is sometimes enough. The students were forced to work for two hours without using laptops or phones and had mixed feelings about it at first but in the end most enjoyed the experience to be offline for a bit. It wasn’t even fair: a team that had chosen pen and paper for making notes was better off than teams that had made their notes on their laptops. So, if you think you live in an unsafe world, always bring pen and paper!
The organizers found it fascinating that all three teams took rather different approaches to solving the case, and that all of them managed to build a surprisingly harmonious group dynamic. Team members worked well together and resolved disagreements without inflicting bodily injuries on one another. Also, all three teams were able to complete the task and delivered solid reports and presentations at the end of the competition.
It was not easy to dub a winner in all of this. However, after some almost as harmonic group work as in competing teams, the jury, which consisted of the four case developers (listed above) plus Justine Dickhoff from NORA, landed on a winner.
We hereby congratulate Yunhao Xiao (BI), Esli Soetens (UiO) and Paulina Becerril Palma (UiB) as winners of the first NORA-HS Case Competition! The winning team will receive a shared price of 10,000 NOK! This should cover a lot of pens and notebooks.
