Driving System Innovation in the Forestry Sector

When challenges are too complex for a single actor to solve, collaboration becomes the key to progress. That’s the principle behind Innovationspiloter för omställning, a project uniting Umeå Municipality, Uminova Innovation, Skogstekniska klustret, and Ignite Sweden to accelerate the green transition through system innovation.

The project aims to explore how public organizations, industry, and startups can co-create solutions that make sustainability measurable, actionable, and scalable. The forestry sector in Västerbotten serves as the testbed.

Connecting Forestry Needs with Innovative Scaleups

The initiative focuses on the forestry sector, where increasing sustainability reporting requirements such as the CSRD create both challenges and opportunities. Many companies still handle data manually and lack coordinated digital systems. The goal is to make sustainability data more accurate, transparent, and actionable across the value chain — from machine manufacturers to forest owners.

Ignite Sweden played a central role in enabling this process. As part of the project group together with Umeå Municipality, Uminova Innovation, Cirkulära Västerbotten, and Skogstekniska klustret, Ignite contributed with needs analysis, scouting, and national matchmaking expertise.

“We formed a project group together where we collaborated on the process, structure, and execution. Ignite’s main role was scouting, matchmaking, and managing the collaboration with startups,” explains Marit Finch-Westin, Head of Public Sector Partnerships at Ignite Sweden.

Skogstekniska klustret, an industry cluster of forestry technology companies based in the Västerbotten region, has collaborated with Ignite Sweden since 2018, participating in seven matchmaking events over the years.

“This project takes our collaboration with the forestry sector a step further, working with a shared, complex problem and bringing together several needs owners and startups to co-develop solutions that can create real impact,” says Maria Olofsson, VP Ecosystems at Ignite Sweden.

Matchmaking & Next Steps Toward Collaborative Pilots

Earlier this year, the project brought together over a dozen innovative scaleups offering solutions for climate data, traceability, and ESG reporting, together with Skogstekniska klustret.

Six scaleups — Emission Twin, GoClimate, Icons Of, Measure & Change, ChainTraced, and SustainLab — were later invited to a matchmaking day in Umeå, meeting leading forest technology companies including Komatsu Forest, Cranab, Indexator, and Norra Skog to explore collaboration opportunities.

Following the October matchmaking, the participating startups were given the opportunity to submit pilot proposals — individually or in collaboration with one another. The forestry companies will review these proposals and select which pilots to move forward with in the coming months. Ignite Sweden will continue supporting the process by facilitating knowledge exchange and shared learning as the actors move toward testing.

System Innovation in Practice

The project demonstrates the power of system innovation, where actors from different sectors collaborate to test new solutions that can scale beyond a single company or industry.

Each partner played a crucial role in making this possible. Umeå Municipality acted as the initiator, driven by its ambition to reach the city’s climate goals through innovation. Uminova Innovation led the process locally and supported the participating startups throughout the journey, while Skogstekniska klustret contributed its industrial network and helped identify the sector’s core challenges. Ignite Sweden connected innovative startups and industry to identify potential pilot collaborations and enable concrete steps toward implementation.

This multi-actor setup — where a municipality, a regional incubator, an industry cluster, and a national platform collaborate — illustrates how system innovation can be organized in practice to address complex sustainability challenges.

“This case stands out because we’re working with a complex problem shared by several needs owners, while also encouraging startups to collaborate around a joint solution,” says Marit Finch-Westin.

This initiative also connects directly to Umeå Municipality’s Climate Roadmap, which brings together 66 companies committed to measurable climate action. The pilots developed through this project aim to provide concrete tools that help companies measure and reduce their climate impact — and to inspire more local actors to join the roadmap and adopt emerging solutions.

“We’re building connections and real collaborations around complex challenges that require system-level solutions. It’s inspiring to see how a regional incubator, a municipality, a national platform like Ignite Sweden, and startups and scaleups from across Sweden can work together to create impact,” concludes Maria Olofsson.