FINEST System Innovations Lab

Creating a sustainable food sector, in line with the SDG goals, is a challenge that no single player alone can achieve. The challenges for a sustainable transition show an enormous complexity where individual solutions rarely create a desired change but often an incremental "improvement" of a system that needs a more radical change to become sustainable - which needs system innovation. At the same time as there is a clear movement where society today places completely new demands on actors in the food sector - the ongoing paradigm shift in how we view food production and sustainable food is becoming increasingly clear. There is therefore a risk that actors who lack the necessary adaptability will be left in the paradigm that is about to be phased out.

FINEST System Innovation Lab offers learning about systems thinking and contributes to building adaptability in both the individuals and the participating organizations. 

A sustainable system change requires changes that not only affect individual parts of a system, but major system changes that shake the underlying logics that build up and lock in the structures in the system.

System innovation can only be made possible by the actors who are part of the system, and therefore necessarily need to build on a willingness to collaborate and learn about each other and their own system context.

This is how we take on the challenges

FINEST System Innovation Lab offers a context, a space and a way for different stakeholders to participate in a co-creative process to solve complex common challenges.

Just as there are laboratories for our technical challenges where experiments are performed and explored in a safe environment, laboratories for systems innovation strive to do the same, but instead social science methods are in focus to find the solutions.

A systems innovation lab provides a stable platform for long-term experiments, where actors together try to explore and find solutions to various societal challenges by exploring new ways of thinking and organizing.

FINEST system innovation lab will be based on three central perspectives:

• Innovations in the value chains Swedish forest berries, protein from legumes and experimental production of food
• The development of collaboration clusters
• The role of the value chains in the overall system transformation of the food system

A large part of the work in the lab will take place through (digital) workshops and action research. In the initial phase of the work, there will be a smorgasbord of generic workshop modules for different aspects of the challenges in the three value chains.

These modules will be developed and adapted in relation to how issues and challenges change in the value chains and / or the system in question. Development work takes place in an iterative process through action research initiatives where learning between actors who participate in the system innovation lab is the most important.

Simply put, FINEST System Innovations lab will be a place that enables a group of stakeholders to collaborate on the development of solutions to system challenges through an exploratory iterative and experimental process.

Our ambition is that we become a co-creative arena for a sustainable system change "in practice". A context that offers actors to jointly find solutions to complex social and environmental challenges in relation to the value chains that FINEST focuses on.

We create FINEST together

At FINEST, we address issues that are too large and too difficult for the individual player to solve on their own. The knowledge we create together is an important key to achieving a sustainable transformation of the food system.