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Digital Infrastructure for Managing Innovation Commons

Request for information (RFI): Digital Infrastructure for Managing Innovation Commons duck Community Knowledge Management in Ecosystems

Why We're Reaching Out

Stiftelsen Compare an DigitalWell Arena is part of a forward-looking national project funded by Sweden’s innovation ecosystem program, “Development and Application of Innovation Commons for Strengthening Innovation Ecosystems.”

We’re now preparing to pilot a digital infrastructure that supports the management of innovation commons—shared methods, tools, knowledge, and frameworks that help innovation actors work better, together.

This RFI is an open invitation to dialogue. We’re reaching out to vendors, researchers, developers, and organizations who are either working on solutions in this space—or interested in co-developing them.

If we succeed in gathering interested parties and capturing good ideas, our ambition is to proceed with procuring a development partnership.

It’s a chance to shape the future of innovation infrastructure together.

Watch the movie and get a feeling for what we are looking for

What We’re Aiming For

We’re looking to pilot a flexible, scalable, and collaborative technical infrastructure that enables:

Effective knowledge sharing and co-creation across organizations.

Traceability of how shared knowledge evolves over time.

Support for collaborative governance of shared resources.

Intelligent search, navigation, and content augmentation using emerging AI technologies.

Open, secure, and modular design that can grow with us.

We believe this kind of infrastructure could become a backbone for innovation ecosystems, supporting everything from experimentation and learning to real-world implementation and scaling.

Who is it for?

The primary users of the digital infrastructure are:

Community Managers who lead and drive the community. They play a vital role in fostering knowledge development within the community.

Community Members who are passionate about the knowledge domain. They use the digital infrastructure to learn, share, and contribute new knowledge and experiences.

Practitioners who rely on access to relevant knowledge in their daily work to deliver results and drive change.

Business Opportunity

As public and private innovation ecosystems continue to grow in complexity and ambition, there’s a strong and increasing demand for solutions that enable shared knowledge management, cross-sector collaboration, and digital commons governance.

We believe this is an opportunity to explore and shape scalable, transferable solutions with potential relevance across regions, sectors, and international contexts for those who have the ability and ambition to commercially scale this type of solution on the market.

Strategic principles

The infrastructure we envision must rest on core strategic principles: openness, security, integrity, digital sovereignty, and democratic values. These align with EU digital policies and are critical to building a trustworthy and future-proof foundation for innovation ecosystems.

Openness
We value open standards, transparent APIs, and modular design to ensure interoperability, adaptability, and freedom from vendor lock-in. Open-source approaches are strongly encouraged where feasible.

Security & Integrity
The solution must be secure by design, with strong protection of data, traceability of contributions, and compliance with GDPR. Integrity also means ensuring the trustworthiness and accountability of both the infrastructure and its content.

Digital Sovereignty
We prioritize solutions that safeguard European control over data, infrastructure, and AI models—favoring technologies aligned with EU legislation and public governance frameworks.

Democratic Values
Innovation infrastructures must reinforce—not undermine—democratic principles such as transparency, accountability, inclusion, and citizen empowerment. As a shared commons, the platform should enable broad participation and responsible governance of knowledge resources.

What This RFI Seeks

We want your input on:

Technology and architecture best suited for managing shared digital resources across organizational boundaries.

How tools like knowledge graphs, LLMs, and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) can unlock better access, understanding, and governance of shared content.

Models for interoperability, data protection, and multi-tenant collaboration.

Insights from similar use cases or innovation platforms.

Business models and licensing approaches that support long-term collaboration and value creation.

We believe that the fundament and core will be the information and data, while the technologies managing, developing, enriching and making it available will, and is, changing in warp speed.

Therefore, we believe that we need a solid solution for organizing and structuring information (knowledge) and a very flexible and adaptable solution on top of that to manage and deliver user value.

Desired Characteristics of the Solution

We’re not looking for a one-size-fits-all platform, but rather a modular architecture that can evolve over time.

Functional capabilities we’re looking for include:

Smart storage, search, and categorization of various artefacts (documents, templates, methods, videos, etc.).

Version control and lifecycle traceability.

AI-supported knowledge discovery (e.g., semantic search, RAG, contextual linking)

Governance support (ownership metadata, usage rights, contribution history).

Logging and usage tracking for continuous improvement.

Cross-organizational and multi-tenant ready.

Adaptable to different user roles, access rights and digital maturity levels

How to Respond

We invite you to respond with:

A short introduction to your organization.

Your reflections, ideas, or proposals in response to the themes above.

Statements on the principles and high-level requirements stated in this RFI

Any relevant case studies, platforms, or references.

A statement on your vision and business concept to scale solutions on the market.

An indication of the interest to participate in a long-term development partnership. We are happy for input on how such a partnership could be orchestrated and your experience in similar processes.

Please submit your response no later than 2025-06-13 by filling out this form and attach any valid documents, presentations and videos.

The information you send in will be handled with care and will not be shared outside our team without your consent.

Questions?

Mail to: lars.bostrom@compare.se or thomas.wernerheim@compare.se

If the questions and answers are of general interest, we will update the webpage FAQ section to reflect that.

Q&A Webinar May 27th

You can now watch a recorded Q&A session about the RFI, held in Swedish. Participants shared questions, reflections, and valuable insights related to the call. The video offers a opportunity to catch up on the discussion and learn more about the background, purpose, and future potential of the initiative.

What we offer

As initiators of this effort, we are fully committed to engaging in a long-term development partnership. We are not just seeking a solution—we are seeking to co-create it.

We offer:

Deep domain knowledge in innovation ecosystems, commons-based approaches, and collaborative governance.

Extensive experience in public sector innovation, digital infrastructure development, and mission-driven collaboration.

Strong capabilities in business development, market introduction, and solution scaling—both within the public sector and in broader ecosystem contexts.

Access to real-world test environments and user communities, allowing for iterative development, prototyping, and real-time feedback.

An established national and international network, including connections to other municipalities, academia, startups, and innovation agencies—offering opportunities for broader adoption and diffusion.

We are prepared to contribute actively throughout the development process, from early-stage conceptualization to piloting and future scaling. Our ambition is to not only create a working infrastructure—but to co-develop a solution with real, lasting impact.

Together, we can build something that goes beyond a technical platform: a foundation for shared innovation capacity that can grow and evolve with the needs of its users.

What Happens Next

We see the response to this RFI as the start of a process that will likely include dialogues, workshops to gain a deeper understanding of both needs and possible solutions.

Our goal is to then, when the RFI process is concluded, procure a development partnership based on the insights that have arisen during the RFI process, whoever this is highly dependent on the outcomes of this RFI, and the possible next steps are as shown below:

Let’s shape the digital foundations of tomorrow’s innovation ecosystems—together.

FAQ Section

During this section, we will publish questions and answers of general interest related to the RFI

To this date no Q&A is published

CONTACT

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