Overcoming the Valley of Death : How to Better Support Hardware Scaleups in the Swedish Innovation System

Abstract: Innovation has emerged in the latest decades as the key driver of economic growth. The Swedish Government has made innovation a key focus and supports a multitude of initiatives to improve the innovation capacity of Sweden. This thesis provides a multiple case study on hardware scaleups, to evaluate how they could be better supported in overcoming the valley of death by the Swedish innovation system. Through the framework of triple helix, actors representing all key areas were interviewed to achieve a holistic view on the system. Through interviews with both scaleups and other actors in the system, a picture of a gap between scaleups and existing infrastructure emerges. The findings show that improving the facilitation of connections between hardware scaleups and Swedish suppliers, improving the access to production competence, and simplifying the access to existing resources in the innovation system are all key to a better facilitation of hardware scaleups growth in Sweden.