Swedish municipalities face many challenges - such as climate change, an ageing population and a transformative crisis in the wake of the coronavirus. At a time of great change, it becomes clear how important it is for municipalities to have a capacity for innovation and transformation, and this is precisely what the innovation platforms are working on. The six innovation platforms in Lund, Gothenburg, Borås, Stockholm, Umeå and Kiruna are at the forefront of increasing the pace of change in Sweden and the platforms cooperate in this Vinnovain-funded project NATSAMIt stands for National Collaboration. The collaboration project is led by RISO.

“It is clearer than ever that society's capacity for innovation and transformation is crucial to our future. We now have an opportunity to solve several issues in one fell swoop,” says Charlie Gullström, project manager and senior researcher at RISE.

Peter Kisch, Future By Lund, points out the importance of the project for the city's innovation work.

“We see that cities and municipalities are increasingly having to work together to find common solutions, learn from and inspire each other. In this sense, we are all co-owners of each other's successes. This national collaboration project guarantees that this will happen,” says Peter Kisch.

The project represented Phase 3 of Vinnova's focus on innovation platforms for sustainable and attractive cities. In the previous phases, the innovation platforms have developed their own unique ways of working.

“It is important to emphasize that each innovation platform is unique and that in each platform there are several different approaches and formats that one is happy with,” continues Charlie Gullström. Many innovation platforms have found successful paths through local collaboration, perhaps through a good organisational strategy in their municipalities or their own project group such as in Future by Lund. Future by Lund is particularly good at collaborating with actors outside the municipality and getting the public to cooperate with private actors across the board. Umeå is a new innovation platform but has a similar starting point to Lund with collaboration with many players.

A new approach to address complex problems that cannot be solved at the local level is the project's “Dialogue Workshop for Transition”. Sometimes the barriers to conversion are outside the municipal authority — and consist, for example, of legal or structural barriers.

“During the first phases of the project, there was a lot of focus on how municipalities should organise themselves internally to be receptive to innovation, such as how to work between administrations,” explains Charlie Gullström. Now we are looking upwards in the system and examining, among other things, regional organisation and national legislation. We want to work more vertically in the innovation landscape to see if there are systemic obstacles that municipalities do not have the resources to solve. That is why we want to set up conversations with appropriate actors at regional or national level in what we call a dialogue workshop.

The project also includes a focus on national follow-up research, in order to gather and reach out widely with the knowledge of the participating cities. Follow-up research also focuses on a number of specific issues, including how cities integrate gender equality and equity into innovation efforts.

“An important goal is to disseminate and make knowledge easily accessible at national level, so that travel can be more frictionless for more cities that want to accelerate their innovation and transformation work,” says Charlie Gullström.

About the project

NATSAM — National Collaboration of Innovation Platforms for Sustainable Attractive Cities

The project is the third and final phase of Vinnova's focus on innovation platforms for sustainable attractive cities and focuses on:

· Develop new ways of leading and organizing innovation in municipal activities

· Strengthen the influence of the local level on the regional and national innovation ecosystem

· Contribute to methodological and policy development to remove systemic barriers at local, regional and national levels

· Initiate an interdisciplinary research field in the area of management and organization of innovation and transformation in municipal organizations

· Laying the foundations for an open national learning platform for deeper learning and strengthening innovation capacity and transformation capacity in Sweden's municipalities, in order to achieve Agenda 2030

The vision is that in the long term the project can be developed into a Swedish equivalent of the OECD's OPSI — Observatory of Public Sector Innovation.

The project is funded by Vinnova, led by RISE and will run from 2020 to 2023.

(From Rise's homepage)