Search

The Primary Innovation programme investigated co-innovation to solve complex agricultural problems in five New Zealand primary sector projects. The projects engaged diverse stakeholders using a collaborative, integrative process to co-define problems, and co-create and implement solutions. Each project included a Reflexive Monitor, who facilitated group relationships, encouraged a systems perspective, and integration of multiple disciplinary and stakeholder knowledges. Reflexive Monitors also encouraged reflexive practice and adaptive project management, while helping the team pursue the project ambition for change. This paper, with respect to the five projects, seeks to address the following research question: Is co-innovation an effective research approach for achieving societal impact from innovations? To address this question, we describe attempts to operationalise and measure co-innovation through 1) five behavioural principles of co-innovation, 2) Reflexive Monitors' focus on each principle, and 3) the presence or absence of elements of the Integration and Implementation Sciences Framework (i2S) for enhancing research impact. We evaluate the relationship between these three process measures and project success, measured by outputs and two proxy impact measures: participants' subjective comparisons with the counterfactual and anticipated achievement of desired long-term impacts. Results indicated that the five principles of co-innovation and the presence or absence of elements defined in the i2S framework were positively related to the three success measures. This suggests validity of these measurement tools, and of using a co-innovation approach and/or systematic attention to the elements of the i2S framework to enhance the processes, outcomes and impacts of projects tackling complex real-world problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Selwyn Waihora Project was a research project supporting a collaborative policy-making process to set environmental limits in the Selwyn Waihora catchment in New Zealand's South Island. In this Design Report we reflect on this project based on data collected from a range of project participants approximately two years after project completion. The data collection was guided by the Integration and Implementation Sciences framework (i2S). On the basis of participant responses, and the authors' first-hand experiences working on the project, we present insights for transdisciplinary research. Through the questions asked by the i2S framework insights emerged on: what it means to honour community values; the importance of context but that projects can pay too much attention to it; boundary objects to foster integration across multiple knowledge systems; the value of intra-team narratives for translation; the importance of considering the losers of the research; and sharing the burden of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socio-environmental challenges the world faces are 'swamps': situations that are messy, complex, and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to help disciplinary scientists navigate these swamps. To achieve this, the paper evaluates an integrative framework designed for researching complex real-world problems, the Integration and Implementation Science (i2S) framework. As a pilot study, we examine seven inter and transdisciplinary agri-environmental case studies against the concepts presented in the i2S framework, and we hypothesise that considering concepts in the i2S framework during the planning and delivery of agri-environmental research will increase the usefulness of the research for next users. We found that for the types of complex, real-world research done in the case studies, increasing attention to the i2S dimensions correlated with increased usefulness for the end users. We conclude that using the i2S framework could provide handrails for researchers, to help them navigate the swamps when engaging with the complexity of socio-environmental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]