Stakeholder Involvement

Involvement of a wide range of actors, such as national policy makers, research funding organizations, relevant research communities from academia and industry as well as user communities is a key pre-requisite for achieving impact in European Partnerships.

In the context of European Partnerships, stakeholder engagement is crucial for:

  • developing and updating Strategic Research and Innovation Agendas (SRIAs);
  • proposing topics and issues for joint actions within the framework of the SRIA to be included in implementation plans;
  • providing advice on ways to implement the joint actions, e.g., via joint calls, knowledge hubs, training, capacity building, infrastructure-sharing, and knowledge transfer;
  • supporting dissemination activities, communication, and promotion of ideas as to raise visibility of the R&I activities being performed through the initiatives; and
  • speeding up knowledge circulation and transfer for the exploitation of research results by many different stakeholders.

The involvement of various stakeholder groups helps European Partnerships to better meet the needs of stakeholders and thus assures the societal relevance of research output.

A number of European Partherships have developed dedicated stakeholder involvement activities and support material (right column).

Examples

Example Biodiversa Stakeholder Engagement Handbook

The BiodivERsA Stakeholder Engagement Handbook is designed to help research project teams to better plan and engage with non-academic stakeholders, including policy makers. The objective of the Handbook is to provide a framework and selection of tools so that each research consortium can determine which types of stakeholder engagement are the most profitable for their research project.

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Example Urban Europe

The case study “Co-creation of a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda in a Joint Programming Initiative - A New Stakeholder Involvement Approach of JPI Urban Europe” demonstrates how a co-creational process design can be used to integrate the perspectives of heterogeneous stakeholders across different countries when setting up a strategic research and innovation agenda (SRIA). The case study shows that a co-creational process design bears potential to establish sustainable stakeholder commitment and provide a nucleus for (in-)formal stakeholder networks. Co-creation approaches can therefore be regarded as a stakeholder involvement (SHI) modality to which other JPIs may refer to in general.

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Example Water JPI

The case study “Bridging the gap towards Innovation - The Water JPI Activities on Stakeholder Involvement” provides information on the Water JPI approach to addresses the complex challenge of stakeholder involvement (SHI) throughout the policy cycle of a JPI with different activities and instruments. Specific attention is given to means to involve innovation-driven end-users (i.e. economic sector respective water suppliers and utilities)

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