Karlstad pioneers in demand accelerator

In DigitalWell Arena’s new demand accelerator, Karlstad Municipality plays a key role. In the work of creating needs-driven development of digital welfare services, Karlstad is pioneering.

As a project partner, Karlstad contributes personnel resources in areas such as legal affairs, procurement, and service development, which can benefit the companies. Naturally, the municipality’s own needs and challenges are also central to its engagement in the demand accelerator.

The foundation of the demand accelerator is to identify real needs in the public sector that can act as a growth engine for the development of digital welfare services together with innovative companies. In the needs-driven cases that the demand accelerator runs, companies and the public sector will be offered support to jointly develop, test, and evaluate solutions.

Better support for companies

– At the Health and Social Care Administration, we have successfully tried being a knowledge resource for companies that want to develop digital services. The collaboration we believe will become possible through the project to develop a demand accelerator builds on this. We hope we can become even better at helping companies develop products and services based on our target groups’ need for support and assistance. The requirements we set can support the company in its development, and the knowledge we gain about how to develop our requirements specification can help us become both better clients and work more efficiently, says Marie Johansson, Head of Development at the Health and Social Care Administration in Karlstad Municipality.

She believes the most important thing is that the collaboration can give more companies the opportunity to develop products and services that benefit the residents of Karlstad. If these can also be made available on the consumer market, it means the opportunities for Karlstad’s residents to be independent increase, which would be very positive.

Support for increased independence

In addition to new welfare technology improving services to residents, there is also a fundamental challenge of making public-sector resources stretch into the future.

– We know that the public sector must transform and broaden the range and alternatives of services to citizens. It will be difficult to recruit new staff in the long term, simply because of what the population pyramid will look like. Welfare technology and digital services can complement and enrich the public sector’s services to citizens. We also know that many people who need support and assistance want to manage on their own and be as independent as possible. We can offer that to some extent today, but we need more and new welfare technology products and digital services, so that we can adapt our services where needed, says Marie Johansson.

Help finding existing solutions

Thomas Wernerheim, together with Ann-Sophie Gustafsson, will participate as development managers for Karlstad Municipality in the project. According to him, there is also to some extent a lack of structures for overviewing existing solutions for the municipality’s needs. Here, the demand accelerator’s preparatory phase and market scanning can fill an important function alongside the development of new services.

– There is no megaphone for reaching out in this ecosystem. Solutions may already exist, but much currently relies on our informal structures and contacts, so we have difficulty finding them. It is about optimising the satisfaction of needs and creating as much value as possible for our users, says Thomas Wernerheim.

• Read more about the demand accelerator