Innovation Circle - A new project increasing time to market

In April Øresund IT and Living Labs Øresund started the work with Innovation Circle - a project with the aim to find new methods in getting innovations to the market. The project, which is a part of the work of Living Labs Øresund, is funded by Vinnova and will hopingly give answers to some very vital questions.

1. Is it possible to increase the speed of which we take service innovations to the market?
2. How can user driven innovation methodology help us increase the quality of ideas and innovations?
3. Is it possible to increase the number of innovations that we run through the "innovation system" partly with help from virtual tools?

In short Innovation Circle is a process, with a virtual tool as a centre. In the tool we can iterate ideas and get feedback from business developers, VC, user groups and developers. Normally this process takes several months and is very time consuming, our goal is to shorten the process to some weeks. Of course we don't know if this is possible, but the project will for sure show this. Connected to the project is researchers from Stockholm and Luleå, who will see which result we will get. It this proof of concept is succesfull, we will continue with searching funds in order to build a full scale system connected to other parts of the innovation system.

As the project is a part of the swedish network of living labs, we will use different methods for user driven innovation/open innovation within the project. This includes not only working with lead users in different user groups, it will also include adapting these methods in order to get feedback from for instance business developers. Hopingly this can increase the quality of those ideas/innovations that is iterated within the system. As a part of the project we also will arrange a number of events around Sweden with the purpose both to market Innovation Circle and to feed the system with new ideas that can be iterated.

The project has allready got lot of international attention. The results will be presented at the European Innovation Society Conference in June in Budapest, at FIRE in Luleå and at the dissemination event in Stockholm late august. We have also been contacted by the European Commission who has a great interest in our work.

The project is run by Øresund IT together with SICS and The Technological Institute of Luleå.