Up in a tower room in Gamla Kirurgen Lund gathered some actors who are important to the sustainable city of Lund. The location overlooking central Lund and with the university wall in wall was well chosen to initiate a collaboration that dealt with innovation management in the complex collaboration environments of cities. The organizers for the event were Julia Jonasson from Rise and Mikael Edelstam from MiljöAB. Mikael has worked with innovation issues nationally, regionally and together with Future by Lund.

- We want to create something that sets a culture of innovation for it to become self-propelled, he said. As it is now, cities and municipalities are faced with limited resources but new and increased expectations. This means that you need to work smarter, more efficiently and innovatively, but also that you need to work with external collaboration.

“innovations arise in gaps between areas of knowledge and are often based on a cross-fertilization of areas and cross-perspectives”

To create this collaboration in Lund, representatives from some important players were specially invited to give their point of view. Participants were Helen Hornemark and Jens Nilsson from Lund Municipality, Wilhelm Ast from Region Skåne, Patrik Rydén and Frédéric Delmar from Lund University and Peter Kisch from Future by Lund.

-It is difficult to say how to rig constellations and how to understand each other, said Mikael Edelstam. We want to create a simplified model for innovation development. If you do this together, we get better questions and can collaborate on solutions. Future by Lund has a need to open up the whole city as a test bed for new projects and collaborations. The test subjects are here and I hope they spread it on to more people.

Future by Lund has a habit of working with collaboration of projects involving industry, universities and municipalities. The working method that has been used then is a Form-Know-How model for innovations.

“It has worked quite well as a framework for understanding, but we have not really gone into it in depth,” said Mikael Edelstam. Now we take that model and connect it to Arne Eriksson's knowledge and see how we can do more.

‍

Arne Eriksson, who has worked on innovation management issues for several decades and has also contributed to Skåne's innovation strategy, participated as a consultant and talked about the innovation process and how difficult it can be to collaborate.

- My thesis is that innovation cooperation requires a deep form of cooperation, he says. It is more and more necessary to cooperate because there is a tendency to fragmentation. Few people own both problems and solutions within their organization.

Arne Eriksson described how innovations occur in gaps between areas of knowledge and are often based on cross-fertilization of areas and cross-perspectives. He also described the term “Wicked issues” in which ambiguity, unstructured problems and unstructured coordination exist in the environment around innovations.

- Each question becomes a unique case and the possibility of standardization becomes limited, he argued.

The small group that was involved in prototyping an innovation model will eventually grow larger so that you can continue to file on the model. During the year, a workshop is planned every month. Mikael Edelstam was pleased with the start.

It was a good discussion. It also shows that you capture quite different things. Now it is my and Rise's task to make this easy and make a model that everyone can adopt. We will grasp the gap between Arnes Eriksson's knowledge and what is useful in everyday life for companies, municipalities and universities.

The project will last for one year and is done with support from Vinnova.

‍

The project aims to achieve three objectives

• Participating organisations should be able to more effectively identify and jointly interpret complex innovation needs in sustainable urban development.

• Participants should be able to collaborate more effectively to create innovations that respond to the needs and get them implemented in society.

• Participants will develop their individual capacity for innovation and thereby increase their ability to collaborate with others on sustainable urban development.

This makes it both more efficient to develop research-based responses to relevant innovation needs and to make research-based knowledge implemented in society. It implies organizational renewal both at the organizational level and at the system level.

The development work is linked to concrete cases within the framework of the innovation platform Future by Lund.

The working methods, models and tools that are developed can then be used in other contexts, or continue to be developed in order to be standardized in the long term or similar.

(From the project application)

‍

Innovation Management

Coordinator: RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB - SP Sveriges Tekniska Forskningsinstitut AB

Financier: Vinnova

Project grants: SEK 1,200,000

Project Time: December 2016 - February 2018