Impact Hub Agder

Impact Hub Agder is a creative and future-oriented sustainability house located in the heart of Arendal, near the town square. Here you will find co-works, event rooms, meeting rooms, a zero-waste shop and a café, providing a unique and inspiring backdrop for social innovation and the realisation of new ideas.

Impact Hub Agder startet as Torvgata 7 in 2017, as an initiative to bring life to empty downtown buildings and help make Agder a more sustainable region. We were among the early established co-working places for social innovation, and first of our kind in Agder. We joined the Impact Hub network in September 2020 and opened our doors as Impact Hub Agder in early 2021.

As part of Impact Hub, we develop the philosophy of our sustainability house, and use tools, programmes and partners that have already been developed in the Impact Hub network to create sustainable growth in the Agder region.

Where to find us

Vision

At Impact Hub Agder, we believe that the world’s greatest challenges will never be solved by one person or organisation alone. We need to work together. That’s why we set out to create a thriving innovation ecosystem where people collaborate across organisations, cultures and generations to solve the grand challenges of our time #SDG.

Mission

Together let’s build the future we want to live in! #TransitionTeam

Solution

Impact Hub Agder is a catalyst to foster social innovation. We are a global community, consultancy and a creative space. We work at the intersection of innovation and society to collaboratively create impact with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Approach

Embedded in Design Thinking, we foster collaboration, unlock creativity and create innovative solutions:

  • Inspire: challenging the status quo is possible – we do it every day.
  • Connect: accessing a professional ecosystem of change makers and curating interaction across silos.
  • Enable: we disrupt mindsets, share expertise and the necessary tools to create a better future for all.

User-Centered. Design thinking is centred on innovating through the eyes of the end user buy building empathy and gaining deep insights.

Experimental. Design thinking gives the participant permission to fail and to learn from their mistakes, because it encourages an iterative development process.

Collaborative. Several great minds are always stronger when solving a challenge than just one. Design thinking benefits greatly from an interdisciplinary team.

De-Risking. Using an iterative approach de-risks products by testing both their relevance and long-term feasibility prior to committing substantial investment.

Well-Structured. Design thinking comes with a lot of useful tools. It draws inspiration from the creative processes, that are divided into different phases, sprints and tools.

Optimistic. Design thinking, like many startup methodologies, is underpinned the fundamental belief that we can all create change—no matter how big a problem, how little time, or how small a budget.