Strengthening governance in place-based ecosystems: Lund Model for Innovation Ecosystem Portfolio Tracking

The third generation of innovation policy focusing on addressing societal challenges requires collaborative engagement and action across a broad base of stakeholders over time to contribute to ambitious missions and transform societal systems. The strategic governance of such collaborative work in innovation ecosystems requires a collective vision and direction, a shared view on what to do, and a way to track progress – to show how various actions contribute to advancing overall aims. Current approaches to monitoring and
evaluation are focused on measuring results for specific actors or projects. There is limited experience and few methods used to track progress and guide forward-looking actions for multi-stakeholder environments that undertake a variety of collaborative actions.

With the objectives of tracking and learning from the interactive innovation processes underway in the ecosystem and using the information to inform strategic decisions and forward-looking investments, Lund University (LU) and Future by Lund (FBL) have developed and tested the implementation of a model for tracking the portfolio of innovation activities in the ecosystem (Lund Innovation Ecosystem Portfolio Tracking – LIEPT). The collaborative development of LIEPT has leveraged existing methods/models from OECD/OPSI and Vinnova together with a new approach for data mining and visualisation from Lund University, applied and tested in ongoing governance activities of the innovation platform Future by Lund.

This paper presents the motivating need, the development process, and the four-step approach for implementing the LEIPT model (establishing scope, mapping innovation activities and projects according to development zone, tracking accumulated financial investments and key events, and data mining and visualisation). Results from application of the model have provided overviews of project portfolios that show the strength and collective impact of the ecosystem and that serve as input to guide future development. This has contributed to a more efficient and effective approach to innovation ecosystem governance at
Future by Lund, and a generic method that can be applied in other innovation ecosystem work.