Research in practice – exploring digital innovation at Tech Borås

How is digital innovation created in practice? At Tech Borås, research takes place close to the everyday reality of companies and organisations, where researchers follow how new technologies, ways of working and collaborations emerge in real development processes.

At Tech Borås, academia and industry come together around a shared goal: to understand and shape digital innovation in practice. Researchers work closely with organisations, following development as it happens – in decisions, workflows and in the interaction between people.

Evrim Güner and Prasanna Balasuriya are two of the researchers exploring how digital innovation takes shape in organisations. Evrim Güner is an Assistant Researcher at the University of Borås and a PhD candidate at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on evaluating innovation sprints as a model for digital innovation, including how digital automation is introduced and governed, and how organisations gradually build capabilities for more advanced AI. Prasanna Balasuriya, a PhD candidate at the University of Borås, studies how generative AI is influencing software development and innovation work, with a particular focus on how roles, skills and collaboration evolve when AI becomes an active part of teams.

Research at the intersection of people, technology and organisation

When Evrim and Prasanna joined Tech Borås, they gained close insight into how companies and public organisations drive digital development. Here, research takes place in ongoing dialogue with those who own the challenges and test the solutions.

“It was the opportunity to collaborate with companies in a dynamic environment that drew me in. The fact that ideas can be tested directly, without delays, creates strong conditions for researching AI-driven innovation,” says Evrim.

For Prasanna, the close connection to developers and organisations has been key.

“It’s in the everyday challenges that the impact of AI becomes clear. That’s where you see how ways of working change, how skills are developed and how innovation is actually driven forward,” he explains.

People at the centre – collaboration as a driving force

Although their research differs, they share a common insight: digital innovation is ultimately about people. Technology only becomes meaningful when it is integrated with experience, organisational context and collaboration between different areas of expertise.

“Working with companies helps us ask more relevant research questions. By exploring their real-world challenges, we gain a deeper understanding of how ideas turn into concrete change,” says Evrim.

In Prasanna’s work with generative AI, the same pattern emerges:

“One key insight for me has been the importance of cross-functional collaboration. It’s in the interaction between software developers, business developers and researchers that ideas take shape and technology becomes truly useful. That’s when AI becomes a shared resource, rather than a specialist tool.”

Towards a deeper understanding of innovation in practice

Looking ahead, both emphasise the importance of a long-term perspective. AI is developing rapidly, but to create lasting value, organisations need to build knowledge, structures and ways of working that stand the test of time. For Evrim, this is where research plays a crucial role: capturing what is happening in the moment and turning it into new knowledge.

“By following real processes, we can understand how AI-driven innovation is actually created. This allows us to develop models and knowledge that organisations can benefit from over time.”

At the same time, there are already concrete opportunities to explore. Prasanna highlights how generative AI can be combined with the region’s strong textile expertise – for example, by moving from manually developed dye recipes to automated, data-driven and AI-supported processes with high reliability.

With a long-term mindset, shared learning and an experimental approach, the conditions are there to understand innovation more deeply – and to turn insights into practice.

This is one example of the work carried out at Tech Borås in 2025.
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