"Samkunskapande" – What it really means to build knowledge together

This blog post reflects the experiences and observations of the visiting team from Arcada University of Applied Sciences. Factual descriptions of the programme are drawn from official MDU conference materials. The visit took place 19–21 May 2026 at Mälardalen University’s campus in Västerås, Sweden. In Part 1 of this series, we described Arcada’s institutional motivations for investing in international collaboration and outlined the programme we attended at Mälardalen University (MDU) in May 2026. This second part turns to what we actually learned there, the ideas that challenged us, the concepts we are taking home, and the concrete next steps we are now pursuing.

Lessons learned – education and R&D

On the “unthinkable” – Dougald Hine’s challenge to academia

Drawing on ideas developed in his 2023 book At Work in the Ruins, keynote speaker Dougald Hine argued that we are living through a moment that demands something different from institutions, including higher education, than the familiar repertoire of problem-solving, innovation, and impact metrics.

His central provocation was that we need to stop avoiding what he calls the “unthinkable”, i.e. the vast territory of loss, grief, and uncertainty that institutional cultures are structurally ill-equipped to address. Rather than always reaching for solutions and forward momentum, he proposed three kinds of work that are urgently needed but rarely named in academic or policy discourse. Hine named three things he believes institutions must learn to do. To save: preserving knowledge, relationships, and practices before they disappear. To grieve: sitting honestly with what has already been lost rather than rushing past it. And to weave: rebuilding the connections between people, disciplines, and ways of knowing that our fragmented world has frayed.

For those of us working in higher education, Hine’s framework carries an uncomfortable but productive implication. Our institutions are good at producing knowledge and credentialing expertise. We are less practised at sitting with loss, at naming what is failing, or at weaving together the fragmented communities around us. His argument is not that innovation is wrong, but that it has been allowed to crowd out other essential human and institutional capacities.

'Taking any deep crisis seriously cannot mean only accelerating the production of solutions. It must also mean developing the capacity to grieve, to witness, and to hold what cannot be fixed.' (Hine, 2023)

This resonates with concerns and matters of care we encounter in our everyday work at Arcada. Co-creation, as practised at MDU, implies a special kind of presence, i.e. the willingness to sit alongside communities not only as expert contributors but as fellow inhabitants of the same troubled world. Hine gave us words for something our own curricula is trying to make space for.
 

On “samkunskapande” – co-creation as a method for shared knowledge

Perhaps the most striking structural takeaway was how deliberately MDU has built systems that prevent research from remaining on the shelf. We learned a new word: samkunskapande (a term that resists easy translation, combining the ideas of co-creation, co-development and co-knowledge-making) captures something that the English word “co-creation” often glosses over: the insistence that all parties genuinely contribute knowledge, not just participation.

This is evident in two flagship centres. The Center for Welfare Change works at the intersection of health technology, change management, and information design, embedding researchers directly in welfare and public sector contexts. The Mälardalen University Automation Research Centre (MARC), launched in 2024 and funded over eight years through the Knowledge Foundation, brings together 26 researchers alongside 26 industrial partners to advance flexible automation, robotics, and digital infrastructure. Different domains, same logic: build genuine knowledge together with the people who will use it.

The concept of samkunskapande has been articulated with clarity by FOFOS (Forskarskola för framtidens offentliga sektor) doctoral researcher Sara Modig (2026), who draws on the Aristotelian distinction between episteme (theoretical, generalisable knowledge), techne (practical, craft-based knowledge), and fronesis (ethical, situational judgment). Modig argues that our institutions habitually privilege the first two while sidelining the third. Yet it is precisely fronesis – the capacity to judge wisely in context – that is most needed when navigating the complex, value-laden challenges that welfare systems face.

Samkunskapande demands that all actors build a shared vocabulary, bring their different ways of knowing into productive tension, and remain open to having their own understanding enriched and revised by the encounter. What we witnessed at MDU is an institution that has made this an operational principle, not just a rhetorical aspiration.

• Samkunskapande requires dedicated infrastructure. MDU’s platforms (Center for Welfare Change, MARC, Idea Lab) are purpose-built arenas for sustained cross-sector knowledge creation.
• Doctoral education can be redesigned as a samkunskapande process. The FOFOS model, embedding researchers in public sector contexts, offers a concrete reference for how this can be done at scale.
• Global impact requires intentional global partnership. MDU’s collaborations with India, Italy, and others are built around shared research agendas, not symbolic exchange.

A particularly interesting workshop took place focusing on commercialisation of research. Venture capital, patenting, intellectual property rights, entrepreneurship and related issues were on the agenda. How do we turn knowledge into value which can create sustainable prosperity and jobs for future generations? It was clear that MDU not only shares Arcada’s ambitions in this area but has progressed somewhat further. We can learn a lot from their approach.

Meeting with the center for welfare change

On dedicated meetings with Petra von Heideken Wågert (Professor of Physiotherapy and Scientific Director of the Center for Welfare Change), Maria Elven (researcher at the center) and other central figures at MDU, the conversations were wide-ranging and informal. The centre’s mission as building a genuinely shared innovation arena, i.e. a model where all parties contribute questions, knowledge, and accountability. What emerged clearly was that the centre is looking for “nodes”, and that Arcada could be one. They are interested in institutions that bring complementary competence, genuine research capacity, and an appetite for the slower, more demanding work of building shared knowledge over time. This approach is in line with Arcada's research strategy, which emphasizes the importance of applied research that contributes to concrete societal benefit, which is well suited to collaborative knowledge creation. Furthermore, Arcada has a number of physical learning and knowledge environments with modern technology that have strong potential for co-creation of knowledge with working life and thus could complement the model developed at MDU. 

Organising around society's needs and challenges

The Workshop with the Center for Welfare Change: Digital Tools to reduce Involuntary Loneliness Among Older Adults provided insights on how universities can organise themselves around shared societal challenges rather than around disciplinary silos. By gathering diverse competencies in response to societal challenges or specific problems arising from municipalities, institutions can create conditions for holistic solutions and innovative ways of working. The center for welfare change has succeeded in generating an enviable level of engagement and willingness to participate among the municipalities. One theme that surfaced repeatedly was the importance of courage and a willingness to test new forms of collaboration and new ways of organising knowledge, as well as the importance of having the support of key individuals and management from the outset.

A particularly compelling model was the way students from different degree programmes are brought together to solve complex problems from multiple perspectives simultaneously. This kind of cross-disciplinary learning not only prepares students for real-world challenges but gives them a sense of participation and social relevance, something that can be powerfully motivating. For a smaller institution like Arcada, which maintains close ties with its students, could use this model more systematically to offer students the chance to engage directly with work and projects that produce new knowledge, practices, and build a reputation that students truly are able to influence things.

The visit also highlighted innovative approaches to university–municipality collaboration. The recipe seems simple enough: industry finds knowledge, knowledge finds context, universities find meaning, communities bring lived realities. Rather than just waiting for partners to come with predefined questions, the approach described involves actively going out to find societal challenges and needs together by using competence teams, workshops, and neutral arenas where different actors can identify and discuss challenges openly. The need and wish to have meaningful impact where universities are part of a wider problem- solving ecosystem was articulated. We do not deal with isolated problems but rather with interconnected problems and for finding solutions we therefore need interconnected individuals from different arenas in our society. Hence, will get inclusive innovations as a result.

'Industry finds knowledge, knowledge finds context, universities find meaning, communities bring lived realities.'

Pilot projects are designed around concrete needs with innovation coaches supporting the process of co-creation and capacity-building. This "icebreaker thinking” locating research questions directly within the challenges municipalities and organizations face offers an innovative and collaborative alternative to more traditional models of knowledge transfer. 

From a Finnish perspective, these reflections raise interesting possibilities. The Finnish Swedish context, with its bilingual welfare regions and strong Nordic connections, could serve as a meaningful platform for developing regional collaborations not only in the Helsinki metropolitan area but across bilingual areas. The Swedish language might be understood not as a niche characteristic but as a door to the wider Nordic region.

Broader strategic questions emerged as well. How might a small University of Applied Sciences be a center for societal transformation, drawing together knowledge and competence around shared challenges rather than dispersing energy across multiple disciplinary hubs? And how might deeper engagement in larger international networks open new pathways to external research funding and broader impact?

There are no easy answers, but the visit made one thing clear: the universities best placed to contribute to societal renewal are those willing to go where the problems are, build genuine trust with partners and municipalities over time, and organize themselves around common purpose rather than institutional convenience. 

Next steps

The conversations we had, both in formal sessions and in the dedicated meetings, produced a clear picture of where collaboration could take shape. A base for further collaboration is internationalisation in education. The emphasis on students as global citizens resonated strongly with Arcada’s ambitions. The Educating for Global Citizenship initiative stood out as a practical framework for embedding global perspectives at course level through virtual exchanges, joint projects, teacher mobility, and collaborative coursework – offering both students and lecturers international perspectives integrated into the curriculum rather than bolted on. The Center for Welfare Change stands out as particularly promising.

In all of these directions, our immediate next step exactly what both Hine and the practice of samkunskapande demand: the patient, deliberate work of weaving and building knowledge together. As a concrete first step, we will initiate a samkunskapande process with peers from MDU in the autumn in order to kick-off a structured exchange between researchers and practitioners from both institutions, designed as a joint inquiry into shared questions. Kwiek (2021) and Khor & Yu (2016) demonstrated (Blog 1) that it is internationally co-produced work that drives research impact, and Jones, Leask, Brandenburg and de Wit (2021) argue that internationalisation fulfils its potential when directed toward mutual benefit and meaningful societal contribution. We argue that it is of interest to Arcada to become a node in that kind of network. A small node with grit. What the literature on organisational persistence suggests, and what Duckworth (2016) describes on an individual level as grit, is that sustained commitment to a clear purpose over time outperforms scale as a driver of impact. A smaller institution with grit, rooted in its region and deliberate in its partnerships contributes more than one (small or large) spread thin across competing agendas.

To succeed with these high ambitions, commitment is required at all levels, students, employees and top management.

Authors: Tomas Träskman, Lotta Eronen, Ira Jeglinsky-Kankainen, Christa Tigerstedt, and Camilla Wikström-Grotell

Co-authors: Erica Adlercreutz, Jonas Danielsson, Mark Dougherty, Anu Nyberg, Åsa Rosengren, and Susanne Åhdal

Part one in the blog series Connecting for global impact: Rooted locally, reaching globally: A case for international co-creation 

References

Compagnucci, L. & Spigarelli, F. (2020). The Third Mission of the university: A systematic literature review. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 161.

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Simon & Schuster.
Hine, D. (2023). At Work in the Ruins. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Jones, E., Leask, B., Brandenburg, U. & de Wit, H. (2021). Global social responsibility and the internationalisation of higher education for society. Journal of Studies in International Education, 25(4), 330–347

Khor, K.A. & Yu, L.G. (2016). Influence of international co-authorship on the research citation impact of young universities. Scientometrics, 107(3), 1095–1110.

Kwiek, M. (2021). What large-scale publication and citation data tell us about international research collaboration in Europe. Studies in Higher Education, 46(12), 2629–2649.

Modig, S. (2026). Samkunskapande för morgondagens hållbara välfärd. Center för välfärdsförändring, Mälardalens universitet.

Petersen, I.H., Kruss, G. & van Rheede, N. (2022). Strengthening the university third mission through building community capabilities. Science and Public Policy, 49(6), 890–904.