Doing more with less (the public sector reality)
Every municipality in Sweden faces the same tension: rising expectations from citizens, shrinking budgets, and a workforce that's stretched thin. Linköping is no different. But rather than accepting that constraint as a reason to stand still, they asked a better question: what if the people closest to the problems already had solutions?
The challenge wasn't a lack of ideas. Employees across the organization saw inefficiencies, had suggestions for better processes, and knew where time and money were being wasted. The problem was that those observations had no structured path from "I noticed something" to "here's what we're doing about it."
Without a system, the best ideas stayed trapped in individual departments. Managers made decisions without the full picture. And employees, understandably, stopped bothering to share suggestions that went nowhere.
Collecting ideas around real priorities
Linköping took a deliberate approach when rolling out Hives.co. Instead of opening a generic suggestion box and hoping for the best, they organized idea collection around specific, prioritized challenges the municipality was already working on.
This is a small but important distinction. When employees see that leadership has identified a problem and is actively asking for input, the quality of submissions goes up dramatically. People aren't guessing what matters. They're contributing to something concrete.
Hives.co's mobile-friendly platform meant that every employee could participate, regardless of whether they sat at a desk or worked in the field. That accessibility matters in a municipality where the workforce spans everything from administrative offices to schools, care facilities, and public infrastructure.
Sorting small fixes from big bets
Not every idea needs the same treatment. A quick process improvement and a major organizational change require different evaluation paths. Linköping built this distinction directly into their workflow.
Minor improvements (the "just fix it" category) get assigned to a responsible person and planned for implementation. No committee, no six-month review cycle. If the fix is obvious and low-risk, it moves fast.
Larger, more complex ideas go through a structured scoring process based on three criteria:
Direction: Does the idea align with the municipality's mission, political priorities, and strategic goals? An idea can be brilliant and still be the wrong thing to work on right now.
Utility and value: What's the potential benefit for citizens, employees, and the organization? How resource-efficient is the proposed solution?
Feasibility: Can it actually be done? This covers budget, staffing, technical requirements, and organizational readiness.
Ideas that clear this initial scoring qualify to build a full decision basis. Ideas that don't aren't thrown away. They're documented and can resurface when conditions change.
200 ideas in three months (and two-thirds less time managing them)
Within the first three months, nearly 200 ideas moved into active workflows for processing. These weren't sitting in a backlog. They were being evaluated, assigned, and acted on.
But the efficiency gain might be the more telling number: the time Linköping's management spent on collecting, handling, and prioritizing ideas dropped by two-thirds after introducing Hives.co. That's not a marginal improvement. That's the difference between idea management being a full-time burden and a manageable part of how the organization operates.
For a public sector organization where every hour of staff time is a budget line item, freeing up that capacity means more time spent on implementation and less on administration.
What makes this work in a municipality
Structured collection beats open-ended requests. By tying idea collection to specific municipal priorities, Linköping ensured submissions were relevant and actionable. Employees knew what problems leadership cared about, so they contributed solutions that actually fit.
Different tracks for different ideas. Not everything needs a business case. Quick wins get fast-tracked. Complex ideas get proper evaluation. This prevents the bottleneck where every suggestion, regardless of size, sits in the same queue.
Accessibility across the whole workforce. A mobile-friendly platform means that the employee maintaining a school building has the same opportunity to contribute as the department head in city hall. In a municipality, the people furthest from headquarters often have the most practical insights.
About Linköping Municipality
Linköping is one of Sweden's largest municipalities, located in the Östergötland region. The municipality serves over 160,000 residents and employs thousands of staff across education, healthcare, social services, infrastructure, and public administration. Like many Swedish municipalities, Linköping balances ambitious public service goals with the practical constraints of limited budgets and growing demand.
