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?

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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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] :

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:

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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.

Session 3 The AgriLink approach to Living Labs

Setting up the Living Labs: selecting the contexts and topics