New teams to be trained in leading Demand Acceleration

The fundamental assumption behind Demand Acceleration is that public procurement can be a tool for driving innovation. In the process, the public organisation works together with innovative companies to develop services that address unmet needs, with the goal that the solutions should both meet users’ needs and be scalable in a market. In practice, an innovation process is procured – not a finished product or service. The public organisation receives the right to use the product or service that results from the innovation work.

First procurement by Karlstad Municipality

Karlstad Municipality has been both a project partner and a customer as the methodology was tested in practice for the first time. From the turn of the year, Karlstad began using an entirely new VR tool that trains health and social care staff in how to interact with clients with dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment.

In the process, a total of seven different companies were procured and contributed, before Virotea was awarded the contract to develop the final service.

Scalability of services a central principle

A fundamental principle of demand acceleration is scalability. This means that the services and products developed should have market potential and be able to spread to other customers.

A handful of intermediaries will now be trained by the DigitalWell Arena team in how to facilitate processes according to the methodology. The aim is to enable economically sustainable scaling, so that more procurements can be carried out using the Demand Acceleration methodology.

– We want to practise what we preach and explore whether it is possible to get others to use the methodology. We will train in the core principles and the analysis behind the approach, and how to create the conditions for putting them into practice, says Neshe Tuna, who leads DigitalWell Demand Accelerator’s training initiative.

The “Train the Trainer” initiative is funded by Vinnova. The teams participating in the training will be drawn from various innovation environments, and several stakeholders have already expressed interest in learning to facilitate processes according to the methodology.

In several cases, there are also public organisations that want to test the methodology together with their local innovation environment – in those cases, they can form a joint team, with both process facilitators and a potential demand owner, to learn the process together.

Seeking experience from more cases

The fact that the principles of demand acceleration have so far only been tested once represents a great opportunity for the teams participating in the training to develop the methodology, says Lina Svensberg, Process Manager for DigitalWell Demand Accelerator:

– Since there is only one procurement, the analysis easily becomes dependent on it, and we do not want to simply copy the process from the first case. This is a way of continuing to work with the analysis and how we conceptualise it. I am very curious and interested in what the interaction with other teams can bring.

• Read more about Demand Acceleration here