Five forward-thinking municipalities have been chosen for this year’s Gnist program. To succeed, they need your help.
We invite innovators who wish to work with design-driven innovation that contribute to sustainable place and business development to market dialogue with this year’s Gnist municipalities. The dates for the dialogue meetings are June 16th and 19th. Sign up using the link below and receive information about the further process.
This year’s Gnist municipalities are Averøy, Andøy, Sarpsborg, Kragerø, and Grue. Five ambitious and proactive municipalities that seek to find new ways to address their challenges. Can your expertise help them with that?
Dialogue meetings improve procurement
Together with DOGA and the Gnist team, each municipality invites participants to dialogue meetings. These aim to provide potential suppliers and municipalities with the opportunity to get to know each other before the procurement process. Each municipality is responsible for procuring an innovation team but receives assistance from the Gnist team in this process.
Through the dialogue meetings, we seek insight into the market and its needs, and we believe these meetings will contribute to better and more accurate procurement documentation. We also hope that this will make it easier and more rewarding for innovators to submit proposals.
Information about the dialogue meetings, the procurement process, the municipalities, and their challenges can be found in the dialogue document available here. We recommend that all participants read the dialog document prior to the meetings.
Sign up for the dialogue meetings
On Friday 16th June, and Monday 19th June, we will conduct five separate digital dialogue meeting via Zoom. All five meetings will follow the same format. The participants in the dialogue meetings will include representatives from the municipality with any partners, DOGA and any partners, and those who have registered.
Schedule for the dialogue meetings:
Friday, 16 June, 2023
• Sarpsborg: 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
• Andøy: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Registration deadline: Wednesday, 14 June, at 12:00 PM
Monday, 19 June, 2023
• Averøy: 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
• Grue: 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
• Kragerø: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Registration deadline: Friday, 16 June, at 12:00 PM
Who can participate in the market dialogue?
We are looking for innovation teams that can contribute to raising the level of innovation and sustainability ambitions in the municipalities. Both small and large actors can participate in the market dialogue and submit proposals when the time comes.
We have a particular focus on how design and architecture can create innovation that contributes to a more sustainable society. Therefore, it is a requirement that the innovation team possesses design, architecture, and/or place development expertise. A multidisciplinary approach is desirable, and we encourage you to include other relevant expertise that can address the challenge in a new and exciting way. For example, natural and social sciences, technology development, arts, business development, humanities, law, engineering, various forms of entrepreneurship, etc. However, we do not require you to assemble consortia to cover all the knowledge needs for the task. We are more concerned with how innovation teams can help unlock and incorporate local knowledge, rather than involving many external actors in the work.
Questions that can be discussed in the dialogue meetings
We do not expect innovators to have a proposal ready for these meetings, however, we want an open dialogue based on the dialogue document and these open questions:
What opportunities and challenges do you see in the chosen challenge for
the municipality? What do you think is important to include in the competition documents that are missing here? What kind of information do you need to create a good proposal? How will you, as potential suppliers, contribute to innovative thinking with such a challenge?
We recommend that you reflect on these questions in the registration form. That way, we can capture your feedback, even if there are many participants and tight time constraints in the meeting.
Why participate?
Since its inception in 2019, Gnist has gained a clear and strong position as an effective supplier development programme, an arena where municipalities collaborate in co-creation in entirely new ways, and as an important innovation tool for early-stage innovation development processes.
Many public actors closely follow the work of Gnist, and good results here can pave the way for the adoption of this approach in many more organisations in both the public and private sectors. This year, we will focus more on facilitating testing and prototyping of solutions, which will be showcased at the Nordic Edge Expo in 2024. Participating in Gnist provides innovators with a significant platform for visibility, and we believe it is both intellectually exciting and commercially interesting to participate.