Open innovation collaboration is recognized as one of the most important factors for European competitiveness in R&D. However, they do not always appear to be fruitful. Through ethnographically supported critical discourse analysis I investigate the discursive resources in meetings between strategic innovation partners that stimulate or inhibit collaboration. I aim to create a framework that explains the dynamics of the meetings. This will help to transform the mid-range concepts currently used to describe collaborations into concrete descriptions of interactional features and processes. Finally, a list of practices that make or break success in open innovation meetings is set up.

The mission of the Dutch government is to render the agricultural system fully sustainable. Despite agriculture being among the most innovative Dutch sectors, solutions remain underdeveloped and hard to diffuse. This project aims to foster new collaborations among all stakeholders as to develop and transfer agricultural innovations within and across ecosystems. We develop a digital recommender system for new collaborations as well as tools for ecosystem governance, coalition building, and joint business model development.

We study the transition to sustainable ecology-based agriculture by using mixed-cropping systems that combine multiple crop species on a single field. Our team elucidates the ecological processes that make mixed cropping systems sustainably productive and we identify which socio-economic and societal or institutional factor need to be resolved to overcome the lock-in in current conventional farming systems. To allow a broad spectrum of farmers, consumers and stakeholders to reach transition goals, we embrace variation in transition paths. We explicitly compare how existing international value chains require adjustments as well as how new short and local value chains can emerge.

The healthcare sector is one of the most carbon-intensive sectors. In response, the Dutch government has called for more environmentally sustainable healthcare. The project ESCH-R addresses this challenge with its mission to accelerate the adoption of circular interventions in hospitals and thereby lower the ecological footprint of the healthcare sector. Our research question is: How can hospitals move away from single use medical consumables and make the transition towards circularity? Together with societal partners, our interdisciplinary team will develop circular, safe and scalable strategies for circularity. In the long-run, the ESCH-R project contributes to a sustainable and resilient health system.

Binnen een fieldlab experimenteren kennisinstellingen, bedrijven en andere regionale organisaties met nieuwe oplossingsrichtingen voor maatschappelijke problemen. De innovaties die zo ontwikkeld worden blijken echter vaak moeilijk schaalbaar waardoor de impact op het maatschappelijke verdienvermogen nog moeilijk aan te tonen is. In het Fieldlab@Scale project doet ons interdisciplinair consortium onderzoek naar het opschalen van missie-gedreven innovaties door fieldlabs in verschillende domeinen: smart industry, gezondheidszorg, landbouw en infrastructuur. Samen met beleidsmakers, regionale netwerkorganisaties, fieldlabs en hun achterliggende organisaties brengen wij de mechanismen voor het gezamenlijk experimenteren in kaart en ontwikkelen op basis van deze inzichten een instrumentarium en opleidingsprogramma voor fieldlabs.