For climate tech startups, developing a promising solution to a customer’s problem is only one part of the challenge. The next question can be harder: how can you prove that it actually works?
For Swedish startup Ecodrop, part of the answer has been right outside its door.
Based at Malmö startup incubator Minc, Ecodrop has developed a small device that attaches to taps, turning water consumption into real-time data and giving users immediate feedback on how much water they’re using.
But the technology hasn’t stayed inside the incubator. Schools have bought Ecodrop’s devices, while Malmö’s municipal housing company MKB is testing the technology in hundreds of homes.
"You can develop a product for some time, but you don’t really know what you have until someone uses it in their everyday life," says Ahmed Nuur, cofounder at the company. "Working with schools and households in Malmö gives us real behaviour, real feedback and real problems to solve."
It’s one example of a much bigger idea taking shape in Malmö: making the city and its people part of the infrastructure that startups can use to test new solutions.
A city built on transformation
Malmö has some useful ingredients for doing this.
The city is Sweden’s youngest and fastest-growing major city, with almost half of its residents under 35. Its population represents 186 nationalities, and its business community is increasingly international.
The private business sector is expanding too. In recent years, employment in the sector has grown faster than in Sweden’s other major cities, with emerging startups, growing small businesses and established companies operating side by side.
Tech has become an important part of that development. Malmö has built particular strengths in areas including gaming, SaaS and impact innovation, while many of its tech companies are developing solutions connected to health, sustainability and the green transition.
Once heavily dependent on traditional industries, such as shipbuilding and manufacturing, the city has spent decades reinventing itself through urban development, sustainability and new industries.
Today, it’s trying to use that experience to tackle a different question: what role can a city play in helping businesses develop solutions?
Beyond capital and talent
Startup ecosystems are usually discussed in terms of access to capital, talent, universities and networks. For impact startups, there can be another requirement: access to the real world.
"If you're developing solutions for water, energy, buildings or mobility, the city itself becomes part of the infrastructure you need. At Minc, our job is to open those doors," says Tomas de Souza, CEO at the startup incubator.
That is particularly relevant for companies working on challenges that affect how cities actually function — from water, energy and building design to circular reuse, mobility and food systems.
Unlike a purely digital product, many of these solutions need to interact with physical environments, infrastructure, organisations or people’s everyday behaviour. Malmö now wants to make it easier for companies to gain that kind of access.
As part of the city’s business strategy for the next three years, it’s putting greater emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship. That includes creating better conditions for municipal operations and physical environments to be used as testbeds and demonstration environments for new solutions.
The ambition is to create more connections between startups, researchers, established companies and the public sector — and to make knowledge, resources and opportunities easier to access.
For startups, this could help shorten one of the most difficult distances in innovation: the gap between an idea and a solution that has been tested under real conditions.
Making proximity an advantage
Malmö’s relatively compact size could be an asset here.
Founders, companies, researchers, universities and public organisations exist within a small geographical area, while the wider Öresund region puts Danish and Swedish cities, such as Copenhagen and Lund, within easy reach.
"Malmö’s advantage is that the distances between people are unusually short," says de Souza. "Founders can be close to universities, established companies and the public sector. When those worlds actually meet, things can move surprisingly fast."
Malmö is now trying to make those encounters less dependent on chance. The city, Malmö University and Minc are working together to develop innovation environments and testbeds, while making resources and expertise more visible and accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, companies and public organisations.
In Malmö Generate District, an emerging innovation district close to Malmö University, more than 150 businesses and research organisations are already concentrated within an area designed to encourage collaboration around innovation, creativity and sustainable transformation.
The long-term ambition is not simply to gather innovative organisations in one place, but to create better conditions for them to develop and scale solutions together.
Ecodrop provides a small but tangible glimpse of what that can mean.
A startup develops a technology within Malmö’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The solution then moves into schools and homes, where it meets real users, real infrastructure and a real societal challenge.
For impact-driven founders, capital, talent and a good idea remain essential. But when your solution is designed to change how society actually works, you also need somewhere to prove that it works.
This September, Malmö is turning up the volume on tech. Explore Techtember here.
