From Tuesday to Thursday this week, the Swedish Innovation Day was held, a conference aimed at educating, inspiring and creating new networks for Sweden's innovation actors. The conference was held in Karlskrona and Karlshamn and was attended by representatives from Sweden's incubators, science parks and innovation support agencies including the Swedish Patent and Registration Office (PRV), the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), Vinnova and others.
Three closely related topics recurred on the agenda, sustainability, the "smart society" and collaboration/social action. The sustainability issues were very much linked to the UN's global goals and touched on the important role of innovation actors in addressing them. The conference served as a good point of inspiration for exchanging successful ways of tackling these sustainability challenges. For example, Sandra Viktor, Sustainability Manager of Mjärdevi Science Park, explained how they have worked with companies in their park to develop sustainability guidelines that have been disseminated to small and large companies. Another example was the European network SmartUp Accelerator, consisting of 10 partners from 7 countries, which aims to promote ideas that reduce the carbon footprint of individuals.
The second recurring topic was innovations for the "Smart Society". These innovations can be described as ideas to meet the challenges we face due to changing lifestyles, increasing population and urbanisation. This requires us to live, live, develop and interact in new ways, while at the same time making use of natural resources.
To find these ideas, most speakers at the conference suggested that we need to include people, groups and organisations that have not yet found their way into the innovation support system to look at the challenges from multiple perspectives. To make this possible, the language among innovation actors needs to be adapted to more target groups and replace "trend words" with understandable explanations.
Although the sustainability challenges are great, the conference showed a number of projects with a positive impact on these challenges and created a breeding ground for many future collaborations between innovation actors and the business ideas they develop. And provided we follow the advice of conference closing speaker Tobias Degsell, to do and not just think, we can look with cautious positivity to solving these sustainability challenges.
