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 is 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 was not a lack of ideas. Employees across the organisation 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 is what we are 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.
Why municipalities are a particular context for idea management
The public sector has a different dynamic from the private sector. Budget cycles are annual and often politically determined. The workforce spans wildly different roles, from preschool teachers to park maintenance staff to economists in the town hall. Decision processes have to be transparent and traceable. And the public expects both efficiency and fairness, two things that occasionally pull in different directions.
Most innovation tools are built for office-based knowledge workers. In a municipality that rarely fits. The home-care worker who sees daily inefficiencies in the routines, the caretaker who knows which building costs the most to heat, the teacher who has ideas about scheduling: these voices have to reach leadership as easily as a department head's, otherwise the municipality loses exactly the field experience that usually has the most practical impact.
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 organised idea collection around specific, prioritised 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 are not guessing what matters. They are 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 organisational 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 is the potential benefit for citizens, employees, and the organisation? How resource-efficient is the proposed solution?
Feasibility: Can it actually be done? This covers budget, staffing, technical requirements, and organisational readiness.
Ideas that clear this initial scoring qualify to build a full decision basis. Ideas that do not clear it are not thrown away. They are 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 were not 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 prioritising ideas dropped by two-thirds after introducing Hives.co. That is not a marginal improvement. That is the difference between idea management being a full-time burden and a manageable part of how the organisation operates.
For a public sector organisation 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.
Customer perspective
Hives.co has exceeded expectations and is visually appealing and accessible as a tool. For us, it has become more than just a technical solution; rather, it is a process and development support in how we improve.
Helena Carlevald, Innovation, Linköping Municipality
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 the town hall. In a municipality, the people furthest from headquarters often have the most practical insights.
Transparency in decisions. Every submission gets a visible status: under evaluation, approved for implementation, parked, or rejected with a reason. That transparency builds trust over time and matters particularly in public service, where legitimacy in the decision process is its own currency.
What other public sector organisations can take away
Linköping's approach is replicable. A few principles that apply more broadly across the public sector:
Start with a specific question tied to a concrete political or operational goal, not an open invitation. An idea campaign on "how can we reduce energy use across our buildings?" produces sharper answers than a generic call for improvement suggestions.
Make sure the platform reaches every employee group, not only office staff. Include people working in the field, in operations, and on shifts. Their on-the-ground experience is often the most under-used resource in a municipality.
Build the decision pathway before you launch, not after. Ideas that sit unused for months while leadership figures out how to evaluate them lose participation. It does not need to be perfect on day one, but there has to be a clear path from submission to response.
Report what is happening. Short monthly updates to employees about which ideas have advanced, which are in implementation, and which have been rejected and why. That kind of feedback is what gets a second and third wave of ideas to come in.
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.
