Recent years have brought new directionality to university’s work with innovation – increasing the focus on addressing societal challenges and contributing to much broader frames for impact. Working with complex challenges, where no one actor can do everything by themselves, requires collaboration across actor groups (private sector, academia, public sector, civil society), industrial sectors, disciplines, geographies – and over long periods of time. It’s been 20 years since the Chesbrough launched the concept of open innovation and despite the positive uptake of this new paradigm for organizing innovation processes, it is still not the norm. Particularly in situations that require broader ecosystems of actors to undertake different phases of collaborative action over longer periods of time (as is the case when working with societal challenges), new approaches are necessary to develop an open innovation culture. 

In an effort to take on a more proactive role in initiating collaborative activities and developing the innovation culture within and for its local innovation ecosystem, Lund University is working together with companies and the municipality in the innovation platform Future by Lund (FBL). FBL works with creating capacity for innovation, building portfolios, joint infrastructures for test, and in this engaging with Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) to develop a strong engine with new capacities for the innovation work across sectors. Lund University has taken the lead in the European Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Policy Platform (ekip) in order to deliver innovation policy recommendations to the European Commission, using policy as an innovation tool and further develop and spread good support mechanisms for networked and open innovation ecosystems. The ekip platform leverages cultural and creative industries (CCI) as drivers of change and transformation – involving ecosystems of large and small companies, institutions, organisations, researchers, and citizens in processes to develop and try new concepts, attract investors, and get new companies and businesses up and running more quickly. 

The local territory where this comes to live is included is the Lund Innovation District (Lund ID) where we can see an expansion of activities in existing innovation portfolios (with new partners and new project investments), the establishment of new infrastructures for testing and demonstration, and the start of new portfolios that leverage expertise across the ecosystem. We also see results of the spread of this proactive, structured support to open innovation processes in several other cities (partners of the ekip Platform). Our practitioner case provides an overview of the support mechanisms used to develop an open innovation culture and build portfolios of action across actors and sectors in Lund. It also highlights lessons learned from the test of these mechanisms in other European cities. Lessons from Lund can provide insights to other universities working proactively to contribute to societal impact.