User:Dokome/sandbox

The potential of Challenge Lab in the long term is believed to be large and transformative for how universities, collaborating partners and funding agencies could operate. The transformative powers of Challenge Lab are threefold: its focus on adding students rather than only researchers, to work on common ground rather than on home ground, and to focus on sustainability challenges rather than on technological opportunities or on market needs. There is also a great potential for networking between similar challenge/social/innovation labs from different regions of the world. The Challenge Lab is located, administered and founded at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim with the Challenge Lab is to: Become an important hub for the triple helix actors within the five regional knowledge clusters where all actors can gather around the students, as they all are interested in and care for the students. Build trust within the clusters through students. As they often carry the capacity of simultaneously being unthreatening and challenging, they can take the role of being the highly needed change agents to society. The core in the lab is built around international master students doing their master thesis, but the Challenge Lab also provide a master level course; Leadership for Sustainability Transitions to prepare prospective students for the C-Lab master thesis. In order for the students to become change agents within the regional knowledge cluster (the system) the students are given some preparation. This preparation is done in a co-creation fashion and is evaluated by the students for continuous development over time. The preparation consists of two parts: Outside-in, including knowledge, methods and tools to understand and deal with the requirements global sustainability will put on the system. Inside-out, including knowledge, methods and tools to understand and cope with the students own values, strengths and visions as well as to understand and manage the interaction with and between the different stakeholders within the system. (See figure, left.) Based on this preparation the students deal with the regional knowledge cluster in two phases. In the first phase they interact with stakeholders on a strategic level to get an overview and understand the system from different perspectives in order to identify critical leverage points. Based on this understanding the students formulate the questions that will be the theme for the second phase. In the second phase, the students will dig deeper into these questions by interacting with more specific stakeholders in a multi-level design process. Backcasting is a key process during the whole Challenge lab process (Holmberg and Robèrt 2000). Backcasting from sustainability principles is also the starting point to free the mind from today’s unsustainable path-depending system and start from a desirable sustainable future. The Challenge Lab is physically located at Chalmes University of Technology at Campus Lindholmen in Göteborg. The lab is physically connected to Lindholmen Science Park, serving as a hub and connecting intersection point between the Industry, insititutes and academia. An new lab is now being built in at Johanneberg Science Park.