The world is full of incubators and science parks, but far from all of them have their own concert hall. However, in the case of the municipal company Piteå Science Park, the concert hall provided their very foundation. 

“The School of Music is located in the municipality, and we saw a need for an incubator for the musicians’ ideas,” Greta Wimander explains. 

This resulted in the Go Business digital incubator, which is now part of Piteå Science Park. Go Business works with creators in the service sector, but also has an innovation arena for heavier industry and renewable energy, the aforementioned concert hall and a wide assortment of other initiatives, activities and partnerships. 

“The municipality wants to offer residents a broad range of job opportunities. Piteå is a cross between industrial town and cultural, creative industries. When we help these industries become cutting-edge, we become a more attractive town and an engine for the entire region.” 

Innovation requires knowledge 

However, just because a place brings together a large number of creative people with great ideas, innovation is not a given.  

“Up here in the north, we’re in the middle of a major transition, so we need to work with new things in new ways. This makes it extremely important to act wisely, to create something new. It’s that journey that makes it innovative, otherwise it’s simply just another project.” 

Certification offers a quality seal … 

To create more opportunities for the required innovation, Piteå Science Park has made a strategic decision to have all of its innovation leaders certified by RISE. 

“Naturally, you can take courses and get diplomas from other organisations as well, but certification is a whole other matter. It’s an extremely involved process, resulting in a clear quality seal that offers credibility. You can pay for a course, but you can’t buy your way to certification.” 

The fact that the issuing body is an independent institute like RISE lends the certification additional credibility.  

“Since we’re going to work with such large and lengthy processes, it’s extremely important that we can present a quality seal, proving that we can actually do what we say we can. The fact that it’s from a neutral party lends additional weight, since they have nothing to gain from it themselves. I highly recommend it.” 

… and makes a noticeable difference 

Moreover, it is not only in contact with external parties that Wimander benefits from her certification. Even in her day-to-day work, which currently involves the initial steps of drawing up a new strategy for developing the campus area in Piteå, she notices a difference. 

“We want to consider the value of the physical location itself in a new way, and now when I’m planning this journey, I really notice just how much the tools I gained from certification benefit my work. A new project involves a curious – and sometimes somewhat uncertain – world, but I know that I have the map to guide us through the entire process, and that it’ll result in something good.”  

This is the rhetorical question posed by RISE innovation expert Dennis Pamlin.

"The climate summit in Egypt in november 2022 showed the full range of innovation: from those who are really passionate about an idea that can revolutionise a whole way of life, to those who have found extremely innovative ways of measuring, so that what is actually destroying the environment suddenly appears to be zero emissions," says Dennis Pamlin: "That's why we believe a change of mindset is needed. We need to move from each sector chasing its own emissions and those of its suppliers to asking what we really need to live well in a world of nearly 11 billion people.

It's a shift in approach that may sound like a play on words, but it makes a difference in what gets done. As an example, Pamlin points to Ireland's transport policy: the Green Isle, like many other places, was working to electrify its car fleet and roads so that it could continue to drive and transport as it does today. The change came when they did a human needs scan and asked the questions "why do we drive?" and "what do we transport?" and "what do we transport?

"Then it became more interesting to think about how food could be grown closer to those who will consume it, how cities could be planned differently and, last but not least, how the status of car ownership could be changed".

Many Swedish innovations

Pamlin points out that this is an area where there is as much Swedish innovation as in emissions reduction. One example is the clothing company Houdini, which helps people move away from fast fashion and large wardrobes to fewer and more sustainable clothes that support a lifestyle where we live more in harmony with nature.

"This is a transformative change, and it is necessary. Value chains are becoming more and more integrated. This means that chasing emissions reductions is not enough. Of course green steel is important, but we should not be producing steel for oil rigs and fossil-fuelled aircraft at all, because these are activities we may not even have in the future. And what comes to the steelworks should come from the urban environment itself, from urban mining, rather than from linear flows between mine and waste. "Starting from what we need and where we need it opens up a completely different way of working.

Focus on avoiding emissions

Pamlin points out that no company is set up to reduce emissions in its supply chain, it is set up to meet a need. So how do you meet the real needs of a fair world of 11 billion people? RISE is part of the Mission Innovation collaboration launched in the wake of the Paris Agreement by Bill Gates and other business leaders, along with the 22 governments with the largest innovation budgets. RISE runs the Net-Zero Compatible Innovations Initiative, and Dennis Pamlin explains that it has taken on the responsibility of measuring the positive impact of new solutions to help companies find the solutions the world needs.

"We're good at measuring the problem: emissions. But what we're working on is complementing that with measures of the solutions, of how we avoid emissions: avoided emissions. Then we can find innovations that we don't even know are solutions today. And investing in a greener future for people in the global South who, because of poverty, have very low emissions today will become as interesting as investing in industrial plants in the North.

30 years ago there was no internet. Electric cars and renewable energy were not seen as serious options. Even when the Kyoto agreement was signed, zero-emission alternatives were still seen as something that could take a share of the market. Now we are talking about transforming the whole economy. This requires such disruptive innovations as digitalisation, streaming and AI. With a long background in the environmental movement, Dennis Pamlin has a habit of trying to explain how the world needs to change.

"But there is a difference when you come with Swedish start-ups, IT companies and other innovators. When we came from the environmental movement, people thought change meant going into caves. When companies with exciting solutions say the same thing, many people think, 'Wow, what's new now? This makes it easier to imagine a future where driving, flying and eating meat are not the norm - because we can simply find more attractive ways to meet, travel and eat. Emissions still have to go, but the impetus comes from creating something new and better.

Time to implement solutions

At COP27, RISE worked in partnership with the OECD and ICLEI, which brings together the world's leading regions and cities. Three new tools were launched and a climate business incubator competition was launched with a partner in India. Dennis Pamlin is now looking forward to returning from the summit and starting to implement the solutions.

"Sweden is a country where, together with the Swedish Energy Agency, we have already identified solutions that could reduce global emissions by one gigatonne of carbon dioxide equivalent - 20 times Sweden's total emissions - so it's hard to find a more exciting country to work in.

The benefits of streamlining the Swedish authorities' processes with AI are valued at around SEK 140 billion per year. The greatest potential is in administration – financial management, HR, legal, etc. – and in planning and diagnosis in healthcare.

But so far, Swedes seem hesitant about direct AI decision-making. In a report on the Swedish people and AI (Svenska folket och AI), only between 15 and 20 percent say that they are okay with the algorithms making decisions that affect such things as insurance premiums, parental allowances, pensions, loan promises and so on.

Could more transparency be the tool to increasing acceptance of this kind of data-driven decision-making?

“Transparency does not solve the issue on its own,” says Jacob Dexe, who in his research has among other things, looked at what the insurance industry sees as value with transparency and how authorities procure so-called decision robots.

“You don't get any trust by sharing an entire database. You need to explain how the information is created. Package, formulate, give transparency a direction to achieve a purpose.”

Set the right expectations

In practice, it comes down to knowing who you have as your customers. Knowing the values they have, what they see in the product. And then setting the right expectations.

"There are specialized services – such as fitness apps, where a narrow customer segment has completely different expectations than with other apps – that work in that particular context. But maybe I wouldn't think it's so great if my heart rate data were to be disseminated in a different context, outside of my fitness app,” he says.

“Here, its users have a perception of what the system is doing that does not match what is actually happening, they will be disappointed.”

In explaining context and technology, several professional categories can contribute, Jacob Dexe points out. Besides engineers and lawyers, there are probably others with more client experience of the questions and the expectations a user may have.

More advanced systems are becoming harder to explain

Jacob Dexe works at the RISE unit for societal transformation. The hope is to be able to help organizations create more responsible transparency and explainability in AI services.

As AI systems become more advanced, it's also becoming harder to explain exactly what's going on under the hood. Machine learning using neural networks is sometimes likened to a black box where the process itself is hidden. One consolation is that in many contexts it is enough for a user to know that something is happening and what it can entail.

“We have learned contexts as to how we explain things,” says Jacob Dexe, exemplifying how insurance companies explain pricing in a home insurance policy.

“You specify your age, where you live, the insurance value and so on. Because you've asked a question about insurance, you understand that the process involves some kind of calculation of risk based on these variables. You then do not need to explain in detail to attain a sufficient explanatory value.”

Regain trust

Jacob Dexe says transparency is a good tool for regaining trust in the event of negative AI decisions.

“If you get a positive decision from AI, it probably means that it matches what you expected. If the decision does not match what you expected, transparency in how the negative decision was reached can still lead to acceptance. One can return to the same level of trust. However, we do not see that transparency can increase trust in a positive decision to the same extent.”

One of the most difficult things seems to be building digital services for the elderly. The latest annual report on Swedes and the Internet (Svenskarna och internet) summarizes the situation as follows:

• Fewer than half of those born in the 1920s and 30s have used e-services in the past year.
• 6 out of 10 can't log in to online public health services without help.
• Among the oldest, only one in three thinks that e-services make things easier.

These kinds of issues are often mentioned. Digital exclusion in Sweden is primarily driven by age. No wonder, perhaps, because when the Internet had a broader impact in the mid-1990s, this group was already in their 60s and 70s. Factors such as level of education, income, disabilities and place of birth also have an impact. In short, things that deviate from the norm.

“If you look at who builds our digital solutions today, just over 80 percent of the world's developers are men,” says Melinda From at RISE “Of those, 75 percent are white with origins in Europe or North America. It is obvious that this group will be very homogeneous.

“We see signs of this in our digital products. For example, voice control that works better for men or facial recognition that works well with light faces but worse with other skin tones.”

Melinda From believes that our services sync better with the norm if they are also based on the norm, and therein the problem.

“Instead, we should develop for those who have the most difficulty using these services.”

Need to find alternative paths

As a service designer with an eye for what norms can do, Melinda From lists several examples of solutions that go wrong. Sometimes it is previously collected data that distorts the design, sometimes it is not a given that a digital service solves the whole problem but instead locks out people who lack the BankID service or sufficient computer skills.

“Somewhere there must be alternative paths. We sometimes digitalize in absurdum when we should instead start from people's needs.

This applies to both the private and public sectors, and as a resident and taxpayer, one might feel that the Swedish public sector should be there for the entire population,” says Melinda From. Her advice to developers is to take advantage of Sweden's anti-discrimination legislation, which lists seven different grounds for discrimination.

“A lot is gained if you consider parameters in the design phase such as gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, religion, ethnicity and transgender identity or expression. Then, of course, there are also the other perspectives that are not related to laws; urban or rural is an example,” says Melinda From.

Investment in inclusive system transition

RISE employs a number of service and interaction designers. There are also several norm-critical experts who can help in the early phases with reviews from a system perspective as well as assessing prototype solutions in ‘real life’

“We are also setting up a new unit for inclusive system transformation and innovation that will be up and running in the fall of 2022,” says Melinda From in conclusion.