About Urban Magma
Urban Magma’s vision is that southern Sweden should become an internationally recognised region in terms of cutting edge development of products and services for urban technology supply systems dealing with energy, water and waste. A place that attracts foreign companies and investors to the region and that creates growth in our environmental technology companies.
Urban Magma facilitates for municipalities, companies and academia to co-formulate the city’s needs. Businesses are then matched against the needs for development of products and services. The urban development areas of Hyllie in Malmö, Brunnshög in Lund, and H+ in Helsingborg all act as engines, with their ambitious sustainability goals. Here, innovative solutions can both be tested and implemented.
Strategic concept
Urban Magma’s aim is for academia and businesses to grow and develop so that exports of products, systems and services will increase, creating more jobs within both business and academia in the region.
Urban Magma is focusing on two key processes: formulation of the city’s needs and development of innovations.
The city’s needs are formulated into focus groups with participants coming from municipalities, municipal corporations, universities, research groups and businesses in general. Six focus groups have been launched since the start. These will pinpoint specific issues and problems related to the technological systems.
When the needs are concretised, the environmental technology companies are brought in to produce innovations that match the urban challenges. This is done in a business and innovation accelerator.
Background
Increased urbanisation and increased climate change are two obvious trends in the world. Cities are growing and facing tougher challenges. The technological systems that have been established are aging and becoming inefficient, requiring huge investments to cope with future needs. It is no longer sufficient to patch and mend the existing systems, because new problems require new ways of tackling them. What we need is fresh and innovative solutions.
Skåne is well positioned to succeed in creating an excellent environment for innovative development of environmental technology. Here, we have leading research capabilities, a large proportion of environmental technology companies and several of Sweden’s most ambitious municipalities in the environmental field.
OECD names Skåne as one of the most innovative regions in the OECD, but points out that if the business sector gets involved to a greater extent, the system would be even more successful. Urban Magma has taken on the challenge, acting as a catalyst in Skåne’s innovation system by connecting companies with municipalities and academia.
Focus groups and their activities
Urban needs are formulated in focus groups with participants from municipalities, municipal corporations and academia. At present we have five focus groups dealing with problems in the areas of waste, systems for district heating, water and sewage, heating technology, urban ecosystem services and industrial symbiosis.
Some of the questions we have dealt with are: How do we reduce supply temperatures for district heating by 15 degrees in 15 years? How do we get food waste from apartment buildings and refine it into a product that improves farmland value?
Organisation
The activities of Urban Magma are driven by a process management team consisting of representatives from Sustainable Business Hub, City of Malmö, Lund Municipality, City of Helsingborg, RISE and NSR. Håkan Rosqvist from Sustainable Business Hub is the process leader of Urban Magma.
The Board is a triple helix constellation commissioned to develop Urban Magma’s long-term strategy. It consists of representatives from the above actors as well as from Alfa Laval, Energy Opticon, Kraftringen, Malmö University, Orbital Systems and Region Skåne.