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Implementing agricultural living labs that renew actors’ roles within existing innovation systems: A case study in France

Quentin Toffolini,M. Capitaine,M. Hannachi,M. Cerf

Published 2021 in Journal of Rural Studies

ABSTRACT

: Living Labs are developed in widely diverse innovation domains, based on principles of users involvement and experimentation in ‘real-world’ contexts, inviting to question the various actors' roles within 12 innovation systems. In the agricultural sector, the implementation of Living Labs may face incumbent routines 13 for experimentation, actors’ relationships, and information circulation, as ‘users’ are mostly farmers already embedded in innovation systems. How, beyond adhesion to inclusiveness principles, the actual practices related to an agricultural Living Lab development make possible to renew or redistribute actors’ roles in the innovation process? To address this issue, we realized a case study, following the development of an agricultural Living Lab in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region (France) by one year long immersion and participant observation. Our 18 theoretical approach was to consider the Living Lab as a boundary object supposed to allow actors from 19 different social worlds to work together in a new way, and relying on infrastructures in order to do so. We thus studied the intertwining between various rationales about the innovation model or the territory, the 21 infrastructures on which the innovation process relied, and actors’ roles construction. Our findings underline 22 the divergent rationales conserved among the LIT’s steering actors, associated with undefined roles, especially 23 for farmers. We further show how these divergent rationales participated in maintaining existing infrastructures 24 of the innovation system, preventing from effectively renewing actors’ arrangements and respective roles. 25 Among these, we describe the farmers’ workshops, and the information sharing paths, both limiting the 26 ownership of the process by non-incumbent actors. Complementarily to the distinctions of various roles in 27 literature, we contribute to relate potentially neglected aspects of the Living Lab management (because not 28 judged strategical) to the room for manoeuvre and possibilities for enactment of expected actors’ roles. We 29 finally discuss the relevant skills and their distribution among actors that our findings suggest for the development of an agricultural Living Lab within an existing innovation system.

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