Digitalization is a source for Industrial Internet, which solutions influence businesses and everyday life in many different ways. The digital transformation calls for understanding, not only about your customers, but also your whole organization. A digital business world opens up for seamless and borderless collaborations in product, service and production development, yet such a visionary future need both systematic and systemic changes in companies. As such open innovation approaches including participatory research studies could support regional growth and increase competitiveness among SMEs. This article describes how these issues have been managed in a transnational project for the Northern Nordics.

As an area of excellence in research and innovation, EffectiveInnovation & Organization (EIO) at Luleå University ofTechnology (LTU) represents an important initiative aimedat addressing societal challenges by combining engineeringand social science research. EIO enables the pooling of resourcesfrom various scientific disciplines to address manyof the societal challenges Sweden is currently facing. Thisbook is one result from such pooling of disciplines, resourcesand cross-disciplinary discussions. Here, some leading EIOresearchers have jointly analysed and reflected upon fivekey societal challenges to identify some of their implicationsand future pathways for research at LTU. All of these challengesspan multiple scientific domains, and competence ininnovation and organisation will be critical if they are to beaddressed effectively.

Starting from interactions with SMEs from a number of different areas, this short paper addresses the challenges of turning hands-on practice into an online supports tool for innovation. The SMEs are found in the North of Finland and the North of Sweden, thus already facing challenges related to the sparsely populated areas. Yet, digitalization and online support may become one way to bridge distances as well as filling knowledge gaps between different domains. Nevertheless, the suggestion to transform practical know-how into an online tool that can be globally accessed and used is non-trivial. Thus, problematizing such ideas could progress these efforts.

The research field of Product-Service Systems (PSS) emerged within the engineering design field to address sustainability and radically lower environmental impact from production and product use stages. PSS research has progressed insights of the industrial phenomena, but are often grounded in either product or service development, and the sustainability perspective had diminished over time. The deviation from what was intended might depend on research methodologies that do not meet the requirements of PSS multidisciplinary research. Some reflections of our research and craftsmanship are thus needed, which is also the purpose of this paper. PSS are used in the paper as a framework to highlight some of the facets of engineering design research activities. The paper suggests that multidisciplinary research has to manage different methodologies and different theories, this can be achieved if underlying assumptions are made transparent and if contradictions between those and the conclusions are discussed. Finally, the paper make an effort to encourage discussions about research methodologies to improve not only research but also implementation in industry.

TARGET is a collaborative project involving a partnership of universities and institutes of higher education in UK, Ireland, Norway, Finland and Sweden. The project will develop tools to enhance capacity in regional manufacturing companies to adapt and embrace new technologies and innovation. This is to be done in collaboration with small/medium sized manufacturing engineering companies - developing, applying and piloting the tools through individual companies' processes. The Toolbox developed will consist of subsets such as Digital manufacturing (robotics and simulation), New Ideas and Thinking (human centred and environmental thinking, competitiveness), Business Models and modern Product Innovation. On completion of the Project, the Toolbox of supports will be made available for use through open access to manufacturing companies. The initial project phase with development of a Toolbox suitable for use in all the project partners' regions is presented.

Firms seeking radical innovation require development teams to articulate design solutions based on open-ended problems. Such problems have no single answer to the problematical situation, but have several plausible solutions. Although prior studies have highlighted the importance of prototyping or other methodologies, they provide limited guidance toward addressing open-ended problems. We investigate how teams make sense of complex design and development problems in order to benefit innovative endeavors. The results illustrate a team-level concept development model that identifies critical stages, associated activities, and influencing mind-set to explain how engineering teams overcome challenges associated with open-ended problems

The paper presents a study based on two views, i.e. innovation in teams of non-designers and live case interactions. This means that a diverse set of roles are involved in the innovation activities that originate from real regional situations. The application area relates to design and development of destinations, e.g. regions, tourism and attractive places. This study focuses on two main issues, namely (a) is it possible to make non-designers momentarily become design thinkers, and (b) is it possible to produce ideas and 'out-of-the-box' views in groups consisting of non-designers within a short timeframe? The purpose of this paper is thus to illustrate and explain these issues in order to contribute to a live case platform for collaborative innovation among society, trade and industry, and universities. The empirical data from four workshops, in total engaging 179 participants, shows that there are several challenges related to the efforts to transfer techniques and methods for design thinking and innovation into the heads and hands of non-designers. For example, trade and business can rarely allocate regular working hours for participatory design thinking, so they act based on traditional professional roles. Also, sessions turn into (unproductive) discussions if the participants are not firmly facilitated and encouraged. Bringing in live cases through the participation of mixed teams places additional requirements on innovation research in respect of implementation and packaging for practical uses.

Regional research project are, as is also regional industry, highly need-based. That is, understanding the stakeholders' (or customers') real challenges and related needs is important. This study is based on interviews with SMEs in the Northern parts of Finland, Norway and Sweden, but also on available innovation agendas and strategies for each country. The differences among the companies in those regions bring forward distinct needs, while many experience similar challenges, for example low population density, long distances and a high dependency on basic industries. Innovation is identified as a key driver of regional growth and competitiveness. SMEs rarely employ the term innovation to describe their activities, but rather stress 'knowing the customer' as important. This indicates one of the challenges to implement innovation strategy as a driver for growth and competitiveness

This paper presents measures for collaborative design in a social context. A number of challenges and implications are identified, and changes done to increase the innovativeness in the outcome are discussed and exemplified. The context is an innovation contest in which students, inhabitants, people in common and so on, freely signs up for participation. The competition's theme comes from a client, e.g. a company, organization or municipality. Besides a research approach originating from 2002, fourteen innovation competitions during 2014-2015 are the specific basis for the empirical data.