Living Labs
Co-creation and multi-actor engagement are at the core of GRANULAR approach. The multi-actor approach, promoted in many European projects such as GRANULAR, focuses on the cross-exchange of different types of knowledge (scientific, technical, practical and other) and the involvement of potential actors and users in knowledge sharing and in the development of innovations, for their implementation and therefore to cover real needs.
GRANULAR will run 7 Living Labs across Europe (France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) and 9 Replication Labs. Both Living Labs and Replication Labs include a variety of actors and geographical contexts, that correspond to different demographic, geographic and governance characteristics.
Living Labs will bring together actors from science, policy and civil society to co-design, test and validate GRANULAR work. Cooperation between scientific actors from different disciplines, from agricultural engineers to social scientists, with non-academic ones (practitioners, policy makers, citizens, etc..) leads to making a further step in transdisciplinary research. It contributes to finding solutions to ‘real world’ problems and challenges, and at increasing the relevance of the ‘academy’ for ‘the real world’, by cultivating a research practice.
In addition, 9 Replication Labs will assess how to replicate the tools and methods of the project in other countries, namely Albania, Finland, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania and Serbia.