Day one in Skellefteå was a full conference day, and it turned out to be one of the more unexpectedly useful days of the trip for our Selling Green thesis.
The event was hosted by Future Place Leadership, a Nordic organization focused on how cities and regions attract talent and investment. The 2026 theme was “Resilient Future Places: From Adapting to Advancing,” and the room was a mix of city planners, business leaders, academics, and us, a group of Chapman MBA students trying to figure out what any of it had to do with sustainability marketing. It had a lot to do with it, as it turned out.
What struck us first was the aesthetic of the event itself. Warm wood staging, plants, clean minimal design, no corporate banners screaming sustainability commitments at you. And yet the entire conversation was about resilience, long-term thinking, and building places people actually want to live and work in. Those are sustainability values. They just weren’t packaged that way. Nobody needed to label it. That is exactly the dynamic we came here to study.
Our professor also presented a session on Chapman’s Business in Scandinavia program, which was a nice moment of seeing our own university represented on that stage. Throughout the day we also heard from speakers with ties to Volvo and IKEA. The Volvo analytics talk was particularly interesting from an operations standpoint, covering how data shapes decision-making at scale. The IKEA session touched on campus design and how physical spaces reflect company values, which connected directly to our thesis. We’ll be honest that the details blurred a little after several hours of back-to-back sessions.
Then there was the AI session. It was entry-level enough that several of us quietly excused ourselves before it finished. Not a knock on the speaker personally, but if you are presenting AI to a room of MBA students in 2026, the bar has moved. What it confirmed for us is something we hadn’t expected to take away from a conference in northern Sweden: the country is genuinely ahead on sustainability, design, and systems thinking. On AI adoption and applied literacy, the gap is much less clear. That observation has stayed with us.
We left Skellefteå the next morning and headed south to Stockholm. More on that in the next post.
