The ILCA team had the great opportunity to plan and facilitate two co-creative workshops at the ISPIM conference in Tallinn, Estonia on June 9-12, 2024. This conference gathers 500 innovation professionals from 50 countries, offering a unique platform to engage with experts from academia, industry, consulting, and the public sector.
As the largest and oldest Innovation Management network, ISPIM brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world to solve challenges, present findings, and drive innovation.
One of ILCA project aims is to share best practices and knowledge related to climate action and innovation. Participating in the ISPIM conference allowed us to extend our dissemination platform and connect with an international group of passionate minds. Instead of just presenting academic papers, we organized interactive workshops to actively engage with attendees.
One of the workshops focused on exploring EU project opportunities to drive systemic change in climate adaptation and drew participants from Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Lithuania. After providing a brief overview of relevant EU programmes, with particular emphasis on Climate KIC’s values related to systemic change and highlighting the upcoming HEI Initiative Call in autumn 2024 aimed at enhancing innovation capacity in higher education institutions, we gave participants the chance to choose the most relevant topics for discussion and problem + solution identification. The four topics were:
- How can city foster systemic change in climate adaptation?
- How can we engage relevant stakeholders to reach systemic change?
- What innovative solutions and technologies we can apply for systemic change in Climate Adaptation?
- What is missing in current education?
Interestingly enough, participants chose topic No 2 Stakeholder engagement and No 3 Gaps in education. By applying World Cafe method participants splitted to 2 groups and first individually offered the ideas or good practices addressing raised challenges. After it the groups discussed mpact of the solutions proposed from the perspective of feasibility, scalability and effectiveness.
The workshop participants identified several key strategies for engaging relevant stakeholders to achieve systemic change. They emphasized the importance of creating a platform for stakeholders to discuss and ideate, fostering institutional alignment with both regional policies and industry needs. Additionally, they highlighted the need to build psychological safety and trust within organizations and with external stakeholders, and to tailor facilitation methods to the specific needs of each stakeholder group. Providing dedicated resources for capacity building and establishing mechanisms to systematically support stakeholder engagement were also considered crucial for driving ideas into action and impact.
In the other group the workshop participants identified several crucial elements missing in current education that are necessary to address systemic change. They emphasized the integration of innovation pedagogy and interdisciplinarity into the curriculum to foster a more holistic and collaborative learning environment. Additionally, they highlighted the importance of creating space for innovation and student ideas, as well as promoting experience-based learning. Breaking down silos within institutions and adopting open science practices to share information and outcomes on a single platform were also considered essential for enhancing collaboration and communication across different fields.
In the end of the workshop interest group, wishing to stay in touch and work on new project in future was formed.
Prepared by: Bailey Lähdesmäki, Ana Aleknavičienė
