Stimulating Innovations: Building Bridges And Generating Spaces

This paper, presented at the 12th European IFSA Symposium (Workshop: "Generating spaces for innovation in agricultural and rural development") in 2016, aims to summarise the main features of the AgriSpin project. The project is being financed by the Horizon 2020 research program of the European Commission aiming at contributing to system-oriented innovation research in agriculture and as complementary to the policy instrument EIP AGRI. The idea behind EIP AGRI is that innovation emerges from interaction between stakeholders. Following this idea, the focus of attention shifts from diffusion of innovations to ways for creating space in which interaction might lead to innovation as a co-creative process. The AgriSpin project (“Space for Innovations in Agriculture”) comprises 15 organisations in 12 EU countries cooperating for a period of 2½ years (March 2015 – October 2017) to address questions pertaining advisory work in relation to the stimulation of innovations at farm level. This paper aims to describe the main features of the project focusing on its conceptual background and methodological challenges while also pointing to some remarkable results (pearls and puzzles) that can be observed so far.