Together with Vinnova, DigitalWell Arena is now creating a completely unique accelerator - based on demand. The starting point is that the real needs of the public sector should act as a growth engine for digital health and welfare services in collaboration with innovative companies.
It is normal for an accelerator to start from a service or product, and the Swedish innovation system is built around stimulating the supply. In the demand accelerator, the order is reversed, where the needs of the public sector come first.
The hypothesis is that the public sector's health challenges can drive innovation to a significantly greater degree. The demand accelerator's focus is therefore on accelerating the interaction between the public sector and innovative companies, in order to develop digital health and welfare services that really respond to a need. A prerequisite is that the need also exists in other public activities and can be formulated in a way that opens up for innovative and scalable solutions.
Attacks two challenges
In its decision justification to support the demand accelerator, Vinnova writes that the public sector today is not equipped to assess companies' opportunities to use public orders as a growth engine. At the same time, the young and smaller companies are not used to having a public client. The demand accelerator therefore describes an innovative way to address both problems, through its idea of developing two synergistically interacting processes.
The workflow mainly consists of three phases: A preparation and needs phase, a matching phase where interesting companies are selected and finally the accelerator phase itself.
In the demand accelerator, companies and the public sector can jointly develop, test and evaluate different solutions. Here, they are offered various support services to ensure that the solution is sustainable both commercially and from the perspective of the business and creates value for the users.
- The big win is that we get the opportunity to work closely together with business and the public sector. This allows us to coordinate, among other things, expertise in law, procurement and information security with both the users' and the companies' perspectives, and not least a scaling perspective, says Lina Svensberg, who is DigitalWell Arena's project manager for the demand accelerator.
Support linked to the customer's needs
Several companies can participate in the same demand case, where the goal in the accelerator program is for one or more solutions to be procured or made available. For the companies, this means that you get a unique opportunity to get accelerator support that is directly linked to the customer's needs, support in meeting important requirements of the public sector and the opportunity to test in a real environment.
A key will be finding the right company for the needs the demand accelerator identifies. There are strong synergies here thanks to the already existing accelerator, DigitalWell Ventures.
- We have a strong network in DigitalWell Ventures in both the Nordics and the Baltics. The accelerator that DigitalWell Ventures started has many components that will also be included for the companies in the demand accelerator, such as access to investor networks, mentoring programs and testing services, says Lina Svensberg.
Fact: Demand Accelerator
- The project is initially 1.5 years and is financed by Vinnova, DigitalWell Arena and Karlstad municipality. The team around the demand accelerator includes, among other things, expertise in procurement law, digital development, corporate relations and investor relations, as well as test expertise from Nordic Medtest.
- The overall goal of the project is to design, test and validate business processes, value propositions and business model in order to establish a scalable demand accelerator business.
