The Human Edge: Creativity as a Driver of Technological Leadership

Skills Supply

The school and education system is vital for Swedish competitiveness – as is making Sweden an attractive country for highly skilled people and companies to work in. IVA aims to stimulate lifelong learning, positive attitudes to knowledge and education, and young people’s curiosity, problem-solving skills and joy of discovery.

Energy and Resources

Energy and resource efficiency and the circular economy are key to Swedish competitiveness and achieving the climate goals. Sustainable alternatives are needed if promises of a fossil-free energy system and a climate-smart industrial and transport sector are to be realised.

Sweden can help shape a future of sustainable prosperity

Change is often unsettling. In these turbulent times, rocked by geopolitical tensions, overlapping crises, accelerating climate change and transformative technological advances, one pressing question recurs: Is there hope?

Climate Urgency and the Nordic Response

With respect to climate policy, Sweden was an early mover in introducing a tax on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels already in 1991. By the end of the 1990s the Swedish electricity sector was almost decarbonised. The remaining sectors, industry and transport, are curerntly the targets of ambitious decarbonization efforts, in Sweden and in the EU.

Seminar with Professor Geoffrey Hinton

International Affairs

IVA is a national academy with a global outlook. The Academy’s international activities are focused on a global outlook and developing influential international relations.

Digitalisation

Sweden’s competitiveness will increase if we can exploit the opportunities offered by digitalisation. The conditions are good, but we need to deal with the challenges, not least by stimulating the digital transformation of companies, strengthening cybersecurity and engaging in a nuanced discussion about digitalisation as an enabler of future welfare.

Focus Areas

IVA drives factual, science-based debate in several areas that are important for society. Below you can see what IVA has to say in these areas, in the form of reports from project activities, consultation responses, statements from the President and press releases.

Global Tech Diplomacy as a Guardrail for AI and Other Disruptive Technologies

The Future of Solar Energy – research and development of Solar Cells

IVA’s Gold Medal 2022: Peter Carlsson – the visionary who dared to invest

Peter Carlsson is the visionary who dared to invest in something that most people thought was impossible. Despite years of warnings and setbacks, he has managed the feat of building a giga factory for the manufacture of green batteries in the forest outside Skellefteå.

Cyber attacks a growing threat to Swedish business

Much publicised cyber attacks and Russian displeasure at Sweden’s NATO application have brought the issue of cyber security to the fore. In the run-up to this autumn’s elections, several authorities have already noticed increased foreign influence activity. And the threat is growing not only towards the state, but also towards Swedish companies. Many are not well equipped, says cyber security expert and IVA Fellow Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder.

IVA’s Gold Medal 2022: Peter Löthberg – the online rebel who connected the world

Peter Löthberg is a technology entrepreneur who, back in the mid 1980s, set out on a mission ‘to network the planet’. As an unstoppable force, he played a key role in the early emergence of the internet for many years, not least in the process of making Sweden one of the first countries in the world to become widely connected.

Resource Effectiveness and the Circular Economy

The Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation should be given responsibility to establish a national strategy to make Sweden a world leader in resource effectiveness and circularity. This is one of the messages communicated in this final report from a project of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).

Textiles – from waste to resource by 2030

The demand for fibres is expected to increase by 150 percent by 2050. This type of increase is not sustainable in the long term, as most of the fibres today are synthetic and come from fossil-based raw materials and water-intensive cotton. This IVA report focuses on the challenges in the textile sector – and on possible pathways forward.

Textile sustainability from a consumer perspective

This report has been produced as a separate appendix to the earlier report on resource-effective textiles produced within the framework of IVA’s Resource Effectiveness and the Circular Economy project. This report was written by Malin Viola Wennberg in her role as Communications Manager for the eight-year cross-disciplinary research programme called Mistra Future Fashion 2011–2019.

A Resource-Effective Food Sector in Sweden

Global food production today accounts for a significant percentage of human impact on the environment, the climate and the planet’s natural resources. The Food subproject, which is part of IVA’s project Resource Effectiveness and the Circular Economy, therefore wants to help find ways to reduce the amount of food that is lost or goes to waste.

Resource effectiveness through shared space in Sweden

Sharing space and existing offices is necessary in a sustainable society. A sector report from the IVA project Resource Effectiveness and the Circular Economy (ReCE).

Attractive Living Environments and Flows – Eight themes in planning good cities of the future

The Attractive Living Environments and Flows subproject has a people-centric focus and has aimed to define important themes to find ways to face the challenges identified domestically and internationally in, for example, the UN’s Global Sustainability Goals.