The focus of the project event is to understand how a region, like Västerbotten, effectively can adopt open and social innovation policies and initiatives to find the right balance between growing cities and increasingly sparsely inhabited areas.
Globalization, sustainable urbanization, demographic change and environmental resilience is some of the main interconnected challenges that affect cities and sparsely populated areas in different ways. Similarly, new paradigms such as the digital transformation, open and big data, sharing and circular economy can be used in different ways to meet these challenges, creating growth and jobs.
The seven regional and local authorities parts of the OSIRIS consortium will meet all together to co-design policies which undertake open social innovation as a catalyst to simultaneously grow and shrink smartly at different “locations” in the regional context.
The program will, among other things, include:
- Co-creative peer review workshops on two regions: Västerbotten (Sweden) and Österbotten (Finland).
- A key note speech by Per Schlingman on “Urban Express – The most rapid urbanisation in Europe is happening in Sweden”.
- Visits to the prototyping workshop at Möteplats Lycksele.
- A big garden social networking party together with other participants at Möteplats Lycksele.
- Study visit at Sliperiet, a big and growing innovation hub in Umeå.
- Project management and Steering Committee meetings… and of course much more.