Course

ANDY LANE:

Agriculture, as a sector of the economy, needs to be sustainable, improve its environmental and social impacts. Those working in agriculture need to use knowledge effectively.

Advisory services can help to bridge the gaps between the findings of researchers and the local contexts, experiences of farmers. There's a need to create innovative agricultural advisory services that can cope with the complexity and diversity of these local agricultural systems. What is the best way to do this?

One way is to create that innovative advisory service through a 'Living Lab.' A Living Lab is a way of bringing different groups of people together to design and develop that service in a real-life setting, drawing upon the knowledge and expertise of all involved. Such working together involves various participatory practices, structured ways of thinking about situations and how to improve them.

This course covers the principles and practices that six different Living Labs across Europe in the AgriLink project used to create innovative agricultural advisory services. It does not provide a rigid template for how to do this, but a flexible set of tools, techniques, and ways for acting and thinking that helps people work together to find improvements to a particular situation. This is not easy or simple to do. But it does mean that all have the opportunity to play their part in the process and also learn from that process.

We hope that studying this course will help you consider if a Living Lab is appropriate for your context and situation. Alternatively, it may help you to run a version of the course for others considering whether to set up a Living Lab, in which case we have produced a trainer's manual and supporting documents on tools and techniques we used.

We learned a lot from our six Living Labs. We hope that you will learn a lot from our course.