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Session 3 The AgriLink approach to Living Labs
Session 3 The AgriLink approach to Living Labs
Now that you have learned about Living Labs and Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems in the first two sessions we turn to how we approached the design and delivery of our Living Labs in this third session.
First watch the following video before moving on to the next section.
Transcript
DAVIDE ZIMOLO:
In the six AgriLink Living Labs, researchers, farmers, advisors, and other actors worked together to develop and test innovation support tools and services. The Living Labs had common elements, but varied in context and challenge across the different European countries.
As a result, there were differences in the innovation process they experienced. A diversity of supporting tools and techniques were used that met the needs of the specific processes used in each Living Lab to determine and develop their innovation service.
In AgriLink, our approach built on the principles of design thinking, systems thinking, and reflexive monitoring in order to test out and put into practice the five key characteristics of Living Labs - real-life setting, co-creation, end-user involvement, multiple tools, and multi-stakeholder participation.
Now go to the next section.
Setting up the AgriLink Living Labs: principles
In AgriLink we established or developed six Living Labs, where scientists, advisors and farmers worked together to develop improved or new advisory techniques, in response to specific industry issues, focusing on the processes of knowledge exchange.
These six Living labs were based in Italy, Latvia, Netherlands/Belgium, Norway, Romania and Spain. We followed the definition of the European Network on Living Labs we discussed in Session 1 and used the five key characteristics of Living Labs to guide our thinking and actions.
Reflective Activity 6
Can you recall what the five key characteristics of the ENOLL definition of a Living Lab are? Can you write in the text box below, based on your previous experiences, which ones that you think you would find the most important ones to consider when establishing a Living Lab?
Answer
The five characteristics are co-creation, active user involvement, real life setting, multi-stakeholder participation and multi-method approach. You may not have found it easy to remember all five, but I hope you could remember some of them.
Even if you could remember all five, you may have found it harder to decide which are the most important. Just saying all of them are important does not directly help in the practicalities of establishing and running a Living Lab. Where do you start? The real-life setting? The prime users? The stakeholders? How do you involve them and get them to participate? How do you ‘sell’ the idea of a Living Lab as the way forward? Which might be most important at the beginning and which later in the development of a Living Lab?
There is no simple answer to this dilemma, but it is important to think about the conditions that are necessary to get started as set out by Egil Petter Straete and Gunn-Turid Kvam of Ruralis, Norway in their AgriLink Practice Abstract 44 on How to make a Living Lab work in an agricultural advisory service:
Living Labs are a set of organisational practices involving a number of people, firms, agencies or organisations to collectively solve or moderate a problem, or to develop an opportunity that is present. Based on our experiences from Norway and a Norwegian Living Lab in the project AgriLink, we have identified four important conditions that must be present or that must be established at an early stage to make a Living Lab a fruitful process.
Click on each number below to reveal the important conditions:
If these four conditions are not met, the progress of the Living Lab may be slow or even also fail to initialise the processes.
When assessing, establishing and running a Living Lab to be effective, the organisers need to assess whether these mentioned conditions are present or whether they need to be developed.
Other conditions may also be important and must be considered in every single Living Lab.
Identifying relevant participants and stakeholders is important. This can be done through a stakeholder analysis whereby each potential stakeholder is assessed depending on their interest in the situation and their influence on the outcome of the Living Lab.
Details on how to do this are contained within Session 6 and also the AgriLink Living Lab Toolbox. Once potential stakeholders with high levels of interest and/or influence have been identified, they can be brought together to develop shared understandings of the situation and common concerns.
When a Living Lab has been established, there is then a need to make sure it functions well. Melanie van Raaij from Innovatiesteunpunt in Belgium set out some considerations for good functioning of a Living Lab in her AgriLink Practice abstract on What is a living lab in the AgriLink project? (Box 3.1).
Box 3.1 Innovation services
One of AgriLink's objectives is to develop innovation services for a sustainable agriculture by making use of Living Labs. A Living Lab is an inquiry process. At the base is a challenge articulated by end users (e.g. farmers, advisors, consumers) involved in a problematic situation.
This challenge is addressed by developing a ‘test product’ (e.g. support services or advice products) through the design thinking process – problem analysis, generating ideas, concept development. This process is characterised by the end-users being actively involved in the development of the test product; multiple stakeholders are also involved in a process of co-creation, using different methods.
Within AgriLink, two people are assigned to specific roles in each Living Lab. One has the role of a facilitator and is responsible for the progress of the process. The other has the role of monitor and is responsible for the quality of the process. This means that the monitor considers the process itself as an investigation and reports on it. Furthermore, the monitor is responsible for evaluating the process against agreed criteria.
Living Labs face various challenges within AgriLink. One of them is limited funding, as a result of which the Living Labs are often linked to other existing projects with their own objectives. Another challenge is maintaining engagement and participation of busy farmers and other stakeholders. A third challenge is to keep the needs of end-users in sight.
In addition to these practical considerations (we will spend more time on the role of monitoring in Session 5 and facilitation in Session 6) and also the five key characteristics of Living Labs, we were also guided by three conceptual frameworks relevant to AKIS (see Box 2.1 What is AKIS?) that helped us to put those principles into practice. The three frameworks we used were design thinking, systems thinking and reflexive monitoring.
Design thinking is a method for practical, creative resolution of complex and ill-defined problems. The recommended stages in design thinking are empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement. These stages are used in an organic, non-linear way as building blocks of an iterative process, going back and forth through them.
Systems thinking is an approach to thinking about and acting in the world that recognises interconnections and contexts by creating systemic (holistic) representations of what ‘we’ perceive about situations. It is very suited to participatory, action-oriented research and is complementary to more systematic, reductionist methods embodied in the scientific approach. It complements design thinking in the way that it approaches the understanding of messy or complex situations for some purpose, usually to effect some changes.
Reflexive monitoring involves active reflection on the part of researchers and practitioners, to critically look at their own practices, their views and their ways of doing things (see also Box 3.1).
We discuss these three frameworks and the tools and techniques we used within them in more detail in Sessions 4 and 5. For the rest of this session, we will look at the contexts the six AgriLink Living Labs were involved with and the role that agricultural advisory services can play within such Living Labs.
Setting up the Living Labs: selecting the contexts and topics
Two criteria were important in selecting the topic and setting of the AgriLink Living Labs.
The first was relevance to sustainable agriculture (which we discussed in Session 2). Each country team selected a topical issue with a clear sustainability challenge in which the potential role of advice was expected to be significant (as you will discover in later sessions, the issue did not always turn out to be as clear as first imagined).
The second criterion was more pragmatic: ease of establishment and implementation of a Living Lab. In selecting the topic and setting of the different Living Labs, pre-existing relations with the relevant stakeholders was an important consideration. In practice, the Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian and Latvian Living Labs built on existing relations, but the Romania and Italian Living Labs started in a new setting with limited prior relations.
Furthermore, it is relevant to note that the Dutch and Norwegian Living Labs were embedded in a wider project or programme with the expectation that that would increase financial room for intervention and facilitate an introduction.
Figure 3.1 below illustrates the overall logic of the AgriLink Living Labs. In practice, it was recognised that this would be a more complex, cyclical and iterative process than this linear representation suggests.
The interactive diagram below provides an overview of the six Living Labs, the main topic, the sustainability and advisory issues at stake, and the advisory service in development. It is important to note that the selection criteria were the implicit starting point but have been further developed and made explicit iteratively and in collaboration with stakeholders throughout the Living Lab process.
The interactive diagram shows that a wide variety of producers were involved in the Living Labs. These range from small scale horticultural producers in Latvia and Romania to commercial vegetable, dairy and arable farmers in Spain, Norway and the Netherlands, and a variety of community level stakeholders in local communities in Italy.
In the objectives of the Living Labs, two groups can be distinguished. On the one hand, some Living Labs aimed to stimulate the development of a specific part of the value chain for a certain product and stakeholder group such as small holders selling to local markets or farmer cooperative. On the other hand, other Living Labs aimed to stimulate the application of specific sustainable practices like crop rotation, IPM and sustainable soil management.
For the further understanding of the dynamics in the Living Labs, it is important to note that the first group focus on sustainability challenges where predominantly a private good issue is at stake, the living labs in the latter group tend to focus on public good issues.
A PDF version of this interactive is available for download.
While the interactive diagram above gives a summary of the six Living Labs, the second interactive diagram, below, summarises the logic of each Lab as set out in Figure 3.1, but further details on each of them can be found on the AgriLink website.
A PDF version of this interactive is available for download.
The multi-stakeholder approach and the importance of agricultural advisors
Now that I have explained what the AgriLink Living Labs were trying to do in terms of developing innovative advisory support services in different agricultural settings, let us take some time to reflect on what agricultural advisory services are like in Europe and how they currently operate.
Agricultural innovations, particularly those innovations leading towards more sustainable agriculture, are increasingly seen as emerging in and best advanced by multi-actor learning networks (including Living Labs) where different stakeholders with their various kinds of knowledge meet, negotiate and institutionalise new meanings and new farming practices (Šūmane et al., 2017; Moschitz et al., 2015).
Knowledge or learning networks make explicit the interactive and participatory character of knowledge generation and innovation, with all the stakeholders, including the farmers, being active partners and knowledge co-producers, exchanging knowledge as noted in Session 2. In order to reach different stakeholders’ mutual understanding and learning, and enhance the generation of innovation, the interactions between and within these groups of actors need to be facilitated.
Knowledge brokerage (see Box 1.2) or intermediary activities to reduce knowledge gaps is key in enabling multi-actor learning networks and in integrating various knowledge cultures (Tisenkopfs et al., 2015).
While all actors in a real-life setting potentially can become knowledge brokers, it is expected that agricultural advisors or agricultural advisory services take a central mediating role and facilitate connections and knowledge exchange among various stakeholders for joint learning. In such multi-actor environments or networks, all the actors are co-creators of innovation.
The notion of knowledge brokerage has changed. Knowledge brokering involves facilitating interactions, learning and co-creating of innovation among various stakeholders. Brokering refers not only to overcoming knowledge gaps, but a range of social, ideological, cognitive and other kind of gaps.
Therefore, the concept of innovation broker and systemic facilitator appears. Innovation brokering is no longer associated with agricultural advisors, it can be whatever actor performs these functions of innovation facilitation.
Reflective Activity 7
I have talked about learning and knowledge a lot so far. From that and your own experiences, how do you view the role of knowledge in agricultural decision making?
Answer
Here is one view provided by Anda Adamsone-Fiskovica of the Baltic Studies Centre in Latvia in her AgriLink Practice Abstract on Types of knowledge and their role in providing agricultural advice:
Knowledge is a key resource in any domain of human activity, including agriculture. Farmers are acquiring theoretical and practical knowledge from various sources, but their status and credibility can vary.
There are power relations in any production, dissemination and application of knowledge represented by various kinds of individuals and organisations, which allow or restrict them from exerting influence on these processes. This bears implications for the type of knowledge that comes to be acknowledged or rejected as valid, credible and useful by farmers, advisors, scientists, policymakers, and other actors in the agricultural knowledge and innovation system.
The sociology of knowledge, being part of a broader field of science and technology studies, aims to reveal the relations between different kinds of knowledge possessed by various stakeholder groups and the way it is being validated, communicated and applied. For instance, science-based generalisable knowledge is frequently treated as superior to individual and local practice-based knowledge of a farmer. Yet, the scientific knowledge might also turn out not to be fully applicable on a given farm due to the specific features of its location (e.g. soil characteristics, topography).
In providing agricultural advisory services it is therefore important not to rely only on the knowledge produced by scientists and implement one-way transfer of information to farmers, but also take into account the daily observations and insights of farmers, thus facilitating mutual knowledge exchange and helping to arrive at efficient individual solutions.
More information on this topic can be found in the AgriLink theory primer on Agricultural knowledge: Linking famers, advisors and researchers to boost innovation.
The importance of relationships in knowledge exchange has been researched by many over the years. Garforth et al. (2003, p. 324) argue that ‘an almost universal finding from studies of farmers’ sources of information and influence is that “other farmers” are their most frequently reported source’.
Other research has emphasised that both knowledge gained through experience and exchange with peers and scientific knowledge are important for achieving sustainability in agricultural systems (Curry and Kirwan, 2014, Labarthe and Laurent, 2013). Indeed, innovation and up-take of new farming technologies or practices are widely accepted as resulting from iterative engagement in non-linear knowledge networks or systems.
In line with this, the literature emphasises the importance of advisors as facilitators of knowledge exchange within these systems (Österle et al., 2016; Cristavao et al., 2012).
I have covered quite a lot of the theory underpinning what we did in our Living Labs, so now it is time to look in more detail at some of the key practices, starting with design thinking and systems thinking in Session 4.
Summary of Session 3
This session has built upon the five characteristics of a Living Lab set out by the European Network of Living Labs by introducing the innovative services our six Living Labs covered and the approaches used in AgriLink to shape their operation – design thinking, systems thinking and reflexive monitoring.
We also looked at the role of agricultural advisors and revisited how knowledge can be viewed within agriculture.
References for Session 3
Cristóvão, A., Koutsouris, A., and Kügler, M. (2012) ‘Extension systems and change facilitation for agricultural and rural development’, In: Darnhofer I, Gibbon D, Dedieu B (eds), Farming Systems Research into the 21st Century: The New Dynamic, 201–227.
Curry, N. and Kirwan, J. (2014) ‘The role of tacit knowledge in developing networks for sustainable agriculture’, Sociologia Ruralis, 54: 341–361.
Garforth, C., Angell, B., Archer, J., and Green, K. (2003) ‘Fragmentation or creative diversity? Options in the provision of land management advisory services’, Land Use Policy, 20: 323–333.
Labarthe, P. and Laurent, C. (2013) ‘Privatization of agricultural extension services in the EU: Towards a lack of adequate knowledge for small-scale farms?’ Food Policy, 38: 240–252.
Moschitz, H., Roep, D., Brunori, G., and Tisenkopfs, T. (2015) ‘Learning and innovation networks for sustainable agriculture: Processes of co-evolution, joint reflection and facilitation’, The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, 21 (1): 1-11.
Österle, N., Koutsouris, A., Livieratos, Y., and Kabourakis, E. (2016) ‘Extension for organic agriculture: a comparative study between Baden-Württemberg, Germany and Crete, Greece’, The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, 22: 345–362.
Šūmane, S., Kund., I, Knickel, K., Strauss, A., Tisenkopfs, T., de los Rios, I., Rivera, M., Chebach, T., and Ashkenazy, A. (2017) ‘Local and farmers' knowledge matters! How integrating informal and formal knowledge enhances sustainable and resilient agriculture’, Journal of Rural Studies, 59: 232-241.
Tisenkopfs, T., Kunda, I., Šūmane, S., Brunori, G., Klerkx, L., and Moschitz, H. (2015) ‘Learning and innovation in agriculture and rural development: The use of the concepts of boundary work and boundary objects’, Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, 21: 13–33.
Go to Session 4: The multi-method approach: applying design thinking and systems thinking