Planning meetings and other events involving stakeholders

When planning meetings or other events, there is always the prior question of what is the right time for a meeting? This will depend on many things, but first of all you need to consider the purpose (or your purpose) for holding the meeting, what the dynamics between the invitees will be and whether there are existing opportunities (a meeting is already planned). You therefore need a clear set of goals for the meeting, the invited participants know the purpose of the meeting, and you have made good preparations for how the meeting will be run and facilitated.

For our Living Labs, it was important that we understood the perspectives, interests, opinions, feelings and ideas of different parties that have a stake or influence on the subject of the Living Lab (this equates with the first phase of design thinking – the empathise phase). This was done by having an initial dialogue with them, both to build rapport and to start building a shared understanding of what the Living Lab is about.

The dialogue consisted of two parts, the first being the identification of the main stakeholders as discussed above, followed by individual interviews with (representatives of) the main stakeholders involved in the sustainability challenge. The interviews aimed to understand each stakeholder’s position in and perspective on the context of the Living Lab and their ideas on the challenges for providers of new innovation support services,which was done by exploring the following points:

Only then was a workshop with the key stakeholders held to gain mutual understanding of different perspectives and to develop a collective view on the core challenges at hand (these workshops were designed using the concept of systemic co-inquiry where participants are invited and supported to engage together in the design of the Living Lab).