Using a co-innovation approach to support innovation and learning: Cross-cutting observations from different settings and emergent issues

Abstract

Co-innovation has gained interest in recent years as an approach to tackle issues in agriculture and natural resource management. Co-innovation requires new roles for researchers supporting these processes and enabling settings in the programs they work in and the organizations they pertain to. The contributions to this special issue explore experiences with co-innovation in different settings from different angles. The special issue presents several studies on co-innovation in a large program in New Zealand, a study based on an EU Horizon 2020 project in the Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom as well as co-innovation experiences from Uruguay and Tanzania. Cross-cutting findings and emergent issues include (i) the need to consider the issue of simultaneously scaling both co-innovation project results and the co-innovation practice, (ii) the issue of flexibility in pace of co-innovation to allow different participants to converge and the flexibility in learning space needed to enable reflection, (iii) the issue of changing the dominant logics of the innovation systems in which co-innovation is embedded and (iv) the need for reflexive monitoring to support processes of co-innovation and their institutional embedding.