Better Rural Innovation: Linking Actors, Instruments and Policies through Networks (LIAISON)

LIAISON was an EU-funded ‘research and innovation’ project that aimed to help unlock the potential of “multi-actor co-innovation partnerships” in agriculture, forestry and rural business. Multi-actor co-innovation partnerships consist of a mixed group of societal actors with complementary competences working together in a co-creative way from the beginning of a new idea until the dissemination of innovative results. The key objective for LIAISON was to encourage and support more of these successful partnerships for innovation. The key questions which were addressed: How to create successful multi-actor partnerships? How to manage multi-actor partnerships? How do you communicate and disseminate the lessons learned? How do you measure the impact of working in partnership for innovation?

Within the LIAISON project a significant evidence base has been built collecting experiences and insights on how multi-actor co-innovation partnerships work and which barriers or success factors they meet. This consist of 200 semi-structured interviews with key informants from partnerships all over Europe and 32 in-depth case studies of such multi-actor co-innovation partnerships. Additionally, 175 multi-actor co-innovation partnerships that usually remain ‘under the radar’ were identified and collected on an interactive map which tells their story. 15 of these partnerships were identified as Rural Innovation Ambassadors and they received the possibility to make a video about their initiative.

The results of LIAISON include ready-to-use methodologies and tools to optimize both the cooperation within multi-actor co-innovation partnerships and the influence of the surrounding policy environment. This translated into 32 posters of examples of multi-actor co-innovation partnerships, 5 How to Guides for practitioners, 2 toolboxes and 10 Policy Briefs. One on participatory methods to facilitate the partnership cooperation and another one to evaluate the impact of your partnership. Visit the website www.liaison2020.eu or the LIAISON Zenodo database (https://zenodo.org/communities/liaisonh2020/?page=1&size=20) for more information.