The Future Center Alliance (FCA – in cooperation with the FCA of Japan (FCAJ), Copenhagen’s Bloxhub, Malmö’s Öresund Future Hub, and SONY Mobile Communications – is organizing the 6^thGlobal Future Center Summit this Spring.  The Summit will take place in Copenhagen, Malmö and Lund, on 6-8^th May 2018.

The Summit will be like a pop-up prototyping lab, testing new ways of thinking and working, using real world challenges as an agenda, and real world locations as its playing field.

The event will bring together approximately 40-50 people who are directly engaged with future centers, living labs, policy labs and innovation labs of all kinds, in order to exchange ideas and good practice about supporting societal renewal and collaborative innovation in dedicated innovation-enabling work environments. Participants will be facilitated to explore new ways to work together on concrete projects in the coming years.

The theme of this Summit is Bridges: Co-Creating Impact Across Borders.

Each Future Center Summit since 2005 has been a journey, and for the first time this Future Center Summit will be a cross-border journey both geographically and metaphorically.

In this nomadic, three-day prototyping Lab, people will visit and experience several world class Future Centers and Innovation Centers to explore and co-create new ways to drive impact in diverse settings, using insights and learnings from the places they visit, the Future Center operating principles, and the multi-intelligence that participants bring.

People from Future Centers, Living Labs and Design Labs from the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Denmark, France,  Turkey, Israel, Japan, Korea and Argentina have already confirmed their participation.

Themes to explore include:

• How to leverage diversity, creativity and passion for societal change
• How to orchestrate cross border collaboration to deal with boundary-spanning issues
• Creative spaces of tomorrow
• How to use a visioning process to bring 2050 up close and personal
• How to create 3^rdgeneration Future Centers which integrate concepts from Future Centers, Innovation Centers and Living Labs

The latest program information – and information about registration – is available on the Future Center Alliance website:  http://www.futurecenteralliance.com/summit-2018.

A number of Japanese organizations from the world of business, the public sector and universities have initiated a Future Center Studies Group (FCSG) in order investigate relevant models for future centers in Japanese organizations. The group meets regularly to explore good practice in existing future centers, living labs and other innovation- enabling environments from diverse perspectives: open innovation, value creation, place versus space, future orientation and organizational renewal.

The FCSG wants to discover how best to create open, expansive – even enjoyable – workspaces, which encourage collaboration, unlock creativity, leverage people’s potential, facilitate teams to push beyond limits, and enable organizations to innovate. They recognize that, “if it were easy to do, our organizations would all be doing it already.”

There is no single ‘ideal’ model, and diverse working models are successful in some contexts, less so in others. This year, the FCSG will address diverse issues relating to the ‘future of future centers,’ hoping to learn about relevant business models to turn creativity and entrepreneurial spirit into innovation excellence.

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