Overview: Designing and evaluating missions for healthy living in Sweden

This blog describes an action research experiment between TIPC and Sweden’s national innovation agency, Vinnova, to advance sustainable food systems and develop organisational capability for mission-orientated innovation policy. For more on this experiment and its contribution to the Nordic learning hub, visit Vinnova resources.

Meeting societal goals for health and wellbeing requires not only new technologies, but deep structural changes in policies, markets, cultural norms and infrastructure – and a shift in how government agencies define problems and imagine solutions.

This recognition formed the backdrop in 2019 for Sweden’s challenge-driven innovation programmes, which were moving beyond sector-based research to support cross-sectoral collaborations tackling complex societal issues.

The national innovation agency, Vinnova, identified a need to embed transformative principles more firmly into its strategy. Together with TIPC, it embarked on a multi-year collaborative learning process to introduce a reflexive layer into mission-oriented innovation.

One focus of the collaboration was a programme addressing the national school food system – an area the Swedish government had identified as relevant to broader concerns around healthy eating, sustainability and public wellbeing.

The ambition was that all pupils should have access to tasty, sustainable meals. Behind this practical goal lay a broader hypothesis: that improving the sustainability and quality of school meals could act as a lever for wider transformation across the food system.

The TIPC collaboration sought to equip policy leads and programme managers with tools to design, implement and evaluate such missions in ways that support experimentation, reflexive learning and systems transformation.

Key challenges

Vinnova faced the challenge of designing and managing mission-oriented initiatives that could genuinely contribute to system transformation – while also embedding a reflective, co-created evaluation process capable of supporting learning, adaptation, and alignment across actors.

This gave rise to a number of organisational challenges:

Integrating theoretical approaches to conceptualise transformative change: Mission-oriented policy was still emerging within the agency, and practitioners were experimenting with new approaches to systems change. Staff were interested in drawing on insights from transitions theory and related frameworks to complement other theoretical approaches and help strengthen their understanding of how missions could influence complex socio-technical systems.

Methodological gaps: Vinnova’s approach to missions was purposefully fluid and design-oriented. Missions were expected to evolve as learning emerged, guided by a shared direction rather than a fixed implementation plan. As a result, practitioners found it challenging to apply a traditional Theory of Change model with clearly defined inputs, outputs and outcomes. Instead, they needed an approach that allowed theories about change to be surfaced, tested and refined in real time.

Evaluating interventions: Traditional public-sector evaluation methods often look backwards, assessing progress against predefined targets. In contrast, transformative missions require ongoing adaptation, continuous learning and the ability to question underlying assumptions – a process sometimes referred to as second-order learning. While some reflective methods already existed within the organisation, practitioners needed ways to adapt these approaches to the context of mission-oriented policy.

Navigating the learning needs of diverse actors and organisations: Mission-oriented initiatives involve multiple organisations and stakeholders working across sectors. A key challenge was how to capture learning across these different actors and ensure insights were shared rather than remaining siloed. This required new approaches to monitoring and reflection that could accommodate evolving activities and produce useful outputs for different audiences – from strategic insights for policymakers to practical guidance for programme managers.

What we did

Over two years, a TIPC core team of action researchers, and learning and communications professionals worked in partnership with programme managers, analysts and strategic leads at Vinnova to develop and test a formative evaluation methodology tailored to the agency’s emerging mission-oriented work. Much of the collaboration took place online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Formative evaluation focuses on improving policy design and implementation through continuous learning, reflection and collaboration. Rather than assessing success at the end of a programme, it provides support for the whole policy cycle from agenda setting to outputs and outcomes assessment in a flexible and iterative way, creating mechanisms to guide strategic decisions using real-time monitoring.

Together, the teams co-developed an approach that drew on the concept of Transformative Outcomes – early signals that interventions may be influencing systemic change. These outcomes provide a way to observe how missions contribute to shifts in networks, institutions and practices that support transformation.

The collaboration introduced a reflexive layer to mission activities through the development of monitoring techniques, learning processes and participatory workshops designed to stimulate second-order learning – encouraging participants to question underlying assumptions and reconsider how change happens.

The collaboration unfolded through several phases, supported by documentation, visualisations, journaling and exchanges to capture emerging insights. These were also fed back into the wider TIPC programme, linking the Swedish experience with experiments in other countries and contributing to learning and development across the membership and knowledge community.

Initiation and early framing: The process began with participatory workshops bringing together Vinnova practitioners and TIPC researchers. The first workshop introduced key ideas from Transformative Innovation Policy, including formative evaluation, experimental policy engagement and Transformative Outcomes as tools for reflection and adaptation. Participants explored how these concepts related to their own mission-oriented activities, using Vinnova project examples to analyse system dynamics, identify regime structures and reflect on possible pathways of change.

Co-constructing a transformative theory of change: The team then worked to articulate a shared theory of change for the missions. This involved identifying intended outcomes, clarifying underlying assumptions and discussing possible indicators of system change. The theory of change was construed as a living framework that could evolve as the missions developed, support future evaluation, and help guide strategic decision-making.

Implementation and learning architecture: As the project progressed, participants began designing the infrastructure needed to support ongoing learning within the missions. This included a formative evaluation process, creating ‘learning history’ templates and designing tools to collect qualitative data from participants. Learning histories were produced that documented emerging practices, challenges and early signs of transformation.

Reflection and refinement: Through workshops and exchanges, the team reviewed progress and tested emerging insights. Participants reflected on their experiences and revisited the theory of change to incorporate what had been learned so far. Their conclusions helped to refine analytical tools and ensure that the evaluation framework remained aligned with the evolving mission activities.

Deepening learning and data generation: Further rounds of interviews and documentation expanded the evidence base for the evaluation process. The team refined data-collection strategies and improved the learning-history templates to better capture the evolving dynamics of the missions. Visualisations and activity reports were developed to make emerging patterns and insights easier for practitioners to interpret and use.

Synthesis: The collaboration concluded with a series of workshops aimed at consolidating the learning generated through the process. Participants reviewed and agreed upon a visual representation of the mission theory of change and reflected on how the formative evaluation approach could be embedded within Vinnova’s future mission-oriented programmes.

Results and impacts

The collaboration between Vinnova and the TIPC embedded analytical frameworks, and led to practical frameworks and organisational learning processes to strengthen mission-oriented innovation policy. It highlighted how evaluation can become an integral part of the innovation process, supporting adaptive management and deeper learning within public policy organisations.

One result was the development of a formative evaluation methodology tailored to mission-oriented policy that helped practitioners track early signals that mission activities might be contributing to broader system change.

The process also led to the development of a shared theory of change for the mission initiatives. This framework made explicit the assumptions underpinning the missions and identified potential pathways through which activities could contribute to transformation in food and health systems.

Another outcome was the creation of a learning infrastructure to support reflection across mission activities. Learning histories, interviews and documentation processes captured experiences from the programme managers and partners involved in the missions, providing a structured way to identify patterns, highlight challenges and make sense of complex changes unfolding across multiple projects.

Participants reported that the collaboration strengthened reflexive capacity within Vinnova. Practitioners became more comfortable interrogating and reflecting critically on their own assumptions about how change happens. This helped reinforce a culture of inquiry and experimentation within the agency’s mission-oriented work.

The project also contributed to networks and peer learning within the TIP knowledge community. Insights from the Swedish experience informed thinking in other TIPC experiments on approaches to formative evaluation and mission-oriented governance, and led to a Nordic learning hub. The collaboration played a role in the later creation of a unit within Vinnova to advance TIP; the creation of a Food Area; and of a national policy and research platform in Sweden.

Learning and reflections

The collaboration highlighted that designing and managing missions for complex societal challenges requires new approaches to policy learning and evaluation. Traditional models that emphasise fixed plans and predefined outcomes are often ill-suited to initiatives that aim to transform entire socio-technical systems. By integrating monitoring and reflection into everyday programme activities, practitioners were able to identify early signals of change and adjust interventions accordingly. This approach helped shift evaluation from a compliance exercise to a tool for strategic learning.

One key insight was the importance of creating structured spaces for reflection and dialogue within mission-oriented programmes. These spaces supported second-order learning, enabling participants to question underlying assumptions and reconsider strategies as the missions evolved. Narrative learning histories and visualisations played important roles in surfacing stories about complex systems change, and in keeping the mission’s direction in view as activities evolved.

Participants reflected that mission-oriented innovation requires strong coordination across organisations and sectors, but capturing learning across diverse actors is challenging. The project demonstrated that participatory evaluation methods can help build shared ownership of the mission goals and learning process.