Intermediate work in blue, green and yellow zone “A lot of talk and a lot of workshop”
The innovation platform Future by Lund works to create new values and to combine and integrate new solutions.
That sounds good, but why can't you just be content to work the way you've always done?
“Society has changed so that, for example, we have moved from consuming gadgets to buying behaviours,” says Peter Kisch. In the past, for example, it was a new TV that was important — now the choice of subscription is added. We pay for a consumption behavior and that is what drives development today. Value is created in processes in which someone or some combine and integrate. In the Future by Lund network, we want us to create a software for society that provides value by being a mix of many components.
What challenges does this change create for organizations and citizens?
“In municipalities, we have traditionally divided the work into administrations and responsibility units in a hierarchical organization. By definition, you set boundaries, this is mine and this is yours. In the new society, new behaviors and needs arise that are outside the old boundaries. The change occurs on the width and not in sequence. This creates organizational gaps that we as citizens or customers may have problems with, such as when we are sent between different authorities or organizations without having our issue resolved. We need to find ways to move from a hierarchical integration to a process and relational integration.
How do we bring the relationships between the different actors together to create new contexts and new results?
“Many of the solutions to be delivered in the future when talking about the city and urban development are in the organizational gap. That's why Future by Lund has picked up the thread. It is no longer a player who has sole responsibility, as in the past the municipality also took care of electricity, heating and water. Now everything is more fragmentary and it places new demands on how we organise ourselves how we do it together. This is why an innovation platform is needed — to connect and create context.
Future by Lund is working on a model with a blue, a green and a yellow zone. What is it supposed to be good for?
“The model is like a map so that we can orient ourselves so we know when we are doing what and who is where. In the blue zone, the organization decides everything itself and has control and mandate. Here you control yourself and there is a structure for how you conduct your business. Outside there is the green zone, which is located in the gap between organizations. There is a need for cooperation and dialogue with shared mandates. Organizations negotiate and create agreements about who does what, what can be done together, and how it should be done. For example, cities and construction companies often work together to build new areas or concrete projects with common goals and shared tasks and resources. If you go further into the yellow zone, the mandate is rather unclear and organisations share challenges and opportunities. Who owns what and who will do what is not clear, presenting greater risks. It is necessary to co-create. In this zone, you need to stimulate, facilitate, test and monitor the outside world in order to create knowledge and understanding. The organizations share the risks surrounding the unknown and the unarticulated. Participant engagement and presence drives the opportunities. Many in Future by Lund's network work precisely with things that are located in the green and yellow zones with areas that one shares with others. Activities carried out in the green or yellow zone can eventually become business opportunities and then end up in the blue zone where organizations take home results, use them, build business and scale.
What is the benefit for those who participate in Future by Lund?
“Identifying whether you are in yellow, green or blue is a great way for organisations to understand and explain where you are and what you may need. This is a way to know what's coming around the corner. Simply being in the blue zone doesn't work if you want to change -- for technology development, behavior change and understanding of cultural change you don't find in the blue zone.
How do I know I'm in the yellow zone?
“When discussing different challenges, one often comes down to the questions “Who is responsible for this?” and “Who will lead the work?”. When the conditions for the work to be done seem unclear, it may happen that the issue lies precisely in the space between different organizations and in the yellow zone of the model. We do not really know who will take the lead and the responsibility and these are precisely the kind of issues that the Future by Lund partnership is trying to deal with.
“It is important to work together on a broad front to create clarity, knowledge and to divide, to then determine where we have the new opportunities, mandates and what this can lead to. It can be said that when opportunities, mandates and responsibilities are distributed and investigated, we have managed to move a challenge from the yellow zone to the blue, where an organization or company can take ownership, mandate and responsibility.
How does Future by Lund work to facilitate work in the yellow zone?
“We initiate and run various test beds and test projects where we practice and train our project partners to drive innovation together to achieve concrete results. We work to facilitate collaboration by, for example, finding seed funding and interested technology companies, bringing people together, initiating and catalyzing and stitching together consortia. We want a lot of talk — and a lot of workshop!
