A regenerative, stakeholder-driven value system

Tell us briefly about the prototype. What questions are you exploring through your future prototype?

- The Guardian’s Boardroom is a future prototype that redefines decision-making in the forest industry, shifting from a resource-extracting shareholder-driven value chain to a regenerative, stakeholder-driven value system. The project explores how traditional and new actors in the forest industry can innovate, build resilience, and thrive in a world shaped by climate change, geopolitical instability, and emerging ecosystem-based governance models.

- Through the pop-up exhibition Explore, Evoke, Evolve – the project explores how today’s waste and by-products can become strategic resources to promote and implement the transition. In an exhibition with six different rooms, The Guardian’s Boardroom examines how some of the greatest challenges of our time can be turned around to create concrete and ambitious alternative futures. The rooms are designed to visualize possible futures, arouse reactions, engage and inspire innovation and change.

On MAD's website you can download the exhibition catalogue. There you can see the six rooms. To the website

Photo: MAD Group

Who are you trying to reach?

- The Guardian Boardroom is designed to reach and engage both current and future actors in forest value systems. This is done by involving industry leaders, indigenous peoples, biomaterial innovators, architects, investors, AI advisors, human rights experts, researchers, policymakers, land managers and multi-species perspectives.

They get an immersive future-driven boardroom experience, where decision-making is guided by ecosystem intelligence, AI, regenerative business models and societal resilience. Engaging people with this breadth of perspectives has both helped shape the development of the future prototype and the project itself. It has also supported the dissemination of insights from the project back to forest industry actors and different parts of the value system.

How is the prototype designed? And how have your target groups been able to interact with prototypen?

The prototype has been demonstrated in three phases: A preview at the Wood Conference for current forest stakeholders and a large pop-up exhibition at

- White Arkitekter in Stockholm, where both the entire reference group, their network and other cross-industry actors were invited to guided tours. Finally, selected parts were also taken to an exhibition in Barcelona – which showed how parts of the future prototype can inspire the development of future sustainable homes. This also enabled scaling and further engagement of international actors.

- For more detailed information about how visitors have been able to interact with the prototype – there is a presentation of the 6 rooms in the exhibition.

Photo: MAD Group

What thoughts and feelings has the prototype aroused in the target group?

I feel hope! So important in a world that otherwise feels dark in many ways. And not fluffy hope, but solidly substantiated and at the same time wonderfully enticing!

Inspirerande! Informerande. Concrete – and at the same time ambitious!

Ambitious futures suddenly feel possible again! Because I can see them – touch them! And see paths to them.

Addresses clear problems without getting stuck in them – but instead creates well-founded futures that build hope, action and concrete paths!

What are your plans for the prototype going forward?

- We have been met with great interest and questions about where the exhibition will travel next – and we have received inquiries about how, for example, workshop materials can be further developed in connection with both the project's overall methodology and for specific spaces.

- Given the short project period, we have chosen to focus on collaboration with the reference group to ensure the highest possible quality and delivery. That said, if additional funding becomes available, we would be happy to explore how the exhibition can reach more people, deepen its impact and continue its journey.

Thank you so much Emelie and Fiona!

Read more about Vinnova's transformation journey for a sustainable forest value chain