On June 16, Stickydot presented at the UIIN Conference 2026 in Stockholm, in a session on Societal Readiness for Innovation. The contribution, entitled “Making Societal Readiness Work for Industry–Academia Collaboration: Tools, Pilots and Practice”, drew directly on the CO-VALUE citizen engagement pilots to explore how involving users and citizens early in the innovation process can reshape and strengthen the trajectory of startups and innovation projects.
The pilots offered striking evidence of what meaningful engagement delivers in practice. Users opened application directions that companies had not put forward themselves, sometimes in sectors well beyond what the products were initially designed for. They surfaced concerns that went beyond the technology itself, including questions about jobs and broader societal implications, prompting innovators not to redesign their products, but to recalibrate their strategy. In most cases, this information would have been valuable much earlier in the innovation journey.

The session also highlighted a productive convergence with the work being done on Societal Readiness Levels at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, which sits very close to the questions the CO-VALUE pilots raise. The room was full despite an early-morning slot, questions kept coming and several participants noted that while they do not typically engage with these themes, they could see integrating a process like CO-VALUE into their own industry–academia support work.

The key message for intermediaries, science parks, technology transfer offices, regional agencies and universities is this: citizen and user engagement is not communication, not market research, and not outreach. It is a partnership function that sits alongside legal and technology transfer support, with real potential to strengthen industry–academia collaborations without slowing down innovation. It also requires serious thinking on intellectual property and the recognition of users’ and citizens’ contributions to marketable products, a challenge Stickydot is actively working on within CO-VALUE.