Working in the middle of the city — Future by Lund's work arouses interest
.jpeg)
Ten years ago, Vinnova started innovation platforms in some Swedish cities — Borås, Gothenburg, Kiruna, Lund, Stockholm and eventually Umeå. In the autumn, the research institute The Rise a digital tour in which seven researchers share lessons and experiences from their accompanying research on innovation platforms in Sweden. In this context, accompanying researcher Emily Wise spoke about “City's system agents” where she told about Future by Lund's journey as an innovation platform and how FBL has rigged and developed working methods to mobilize many actors in the Lund ecosystem to act together, across actor sectors and industries to solve societal challenges. Emily Wise works as a researcher at CIRCLE and senior strategist at LU Samand holds a PhD in innovation policy.
Check out the content afterwards.
- Lund has taken a different path than the others and, in line with the call, has focused not on innovation within the municipality but on the city's innovation work involving the municipality together with many others, says Emily Wise. The Innovation Platform is a gathering place for many actors where they can find new opportunities and act together over time, and where they can create multifaceted innovation portfolios that contribute to a more attractive and sustainable city and an attractive and sustainable society.
Future by Lund started as a project focusing on technological innovation in the Brunnshög district but evolved to be an innovation project involving municipalities, universities and companies. The work takes place in several thematic areas combined with cross-connections between them and contributes to an active and sustainable city.
- Innovation policy of the third generation is aimed at solving societal challenges, so that instead of looking at more and better innovations, we work on formulating their direction in order to be able to solve societal challenges, continues Emily Wise. A new focus on society and sociotechnical systems requires greater collaboration. Involving many actors with many perspectives over a long period of time has consequences for relationship work (governance). How do you bring together many actors with different perspectives in a change effort that spans decades? It requires a great deal of flexibility, agility and a different way of acting.
Emily Wise tells us that cities can be seen as natural arenas for co-creation processes across different technical sectoral and disciplinary boundaries. But resources are of course limited to implement policies and to act at the system level. There may be tension between operational capability and mandate and a strategic capacity and mandate. Do agents then be needed to support a system change and what approach can be envisaged in that case?
- I mean that the innovation platform Future by Lund is a case to learn from, says Emily Wise. I have been following FBL since 2019 and see how the platform has started to act as a system agent. FBL has gone from being a project to an actor developing the place or territory of Lund.
As the Future by Lund project has begun to come to an end, Future by Lund has moved to operate as an economic association with Lund Municipality, Lund University and Lund's business community and organisations on the board and as members. The focus is on solving complex and shared challenges and during the year 32 members and 100+ project partners have been attached to the business. In the organization there is a core team but also project partners who work with different work areas and in-kind personnel.
Future by Lund has also, with the help of Emily Wise and her colleagues at LU Collaboration, developed and applied a new model to follow developments in ecosystems and portfolios (LIEPT). The model was presented in Budapest in the spring of 2023. The model is designed to move from reporting on individual project results to starting to group projects based on portfolios, so you can track milestones, cumulative results, and demonstrate movement and scaling at the system level.
One of Emily Wise's conclusions is that collaboration in a well-functioning ecosystem is required to bring about solutions to societal challenges that are at the interface between different mandates. Here's how she summarized some actions that can be done based on Future by Lund's approach:
*Taking on an active role for the whole — an agent of change for ecosystems
*Leverage the assets of the ecosystem (share resources)
*Building on complementary skills in the team of change agents
* Focus on action and experimentation, learning by doing
*Creating a broader movement, shared values
* Capture and communicate the results of the system
*Being prepared to build and work in (protected) exploratory spaces
- In order to get the involvement of other organisations, we have had the advantage of being seen as public, says Katarina Scott, Future by Lund. We don't own anything, don't take any IP, are neutral, make sure everyone gets something out of it, and yank in when it doesn't work. We tell about others and actively ask what results they need. All of this makes many people ready to bet and participate.
Of course, there are many interacting factors that have made spacing work possible.
“It has also been important that Vinnova's programme has given Future by Lund the legitimacy to assume the common role, the role of the space,” continues Emily Wise. No actor owns the question in the middle, but someone must take the lead and work as the agent who brings together wills and goals. This is a role that is very much needed, especially if you are dealing with societal challenges.
One of the participants in the webinar was Jonas Gumbel, Vinnova.
- It's amazing to hear a success story like this, he says. What I get caught up in is that Future by Lund has found a long-term funding model. The transition to regular operations and a sustainable business model is often the most difficult step to take for many innovation initiatives, even if they have been successful in the field of innovation.
