This is a CTP of initiative: Living Labs - Laurea (Finland)
This Critical Turning Point (CTP2) emerged around challenges faced in the cooperation between actors in a living lab project that was running under the Laure Living Labs umbrella. The living lab project is called: ‘Sharing and Caring Networks’. The Sharing and Caring Networks project is described as: “a project enhancing residents' participation and stakeholder collaboration in urban development funded by Ministry of Environment in Finland (2013-2015). The project took place in one of the city districts, Espoo Centre with 17 000 inhabitants (Laurea.fi, 2016)”. It aimed at promoting residents’ interest and participation in the development of their neighborhood. Secondly, by getting the residents’ cooperation it hoped to create a networking model for regional development. Lastly, it aimed to develop efficient means for stakeholder cooperation including residents, developers, communities and companies. The activities of the project included workshops and various meetings in which urban development matters and cooperation were discussed. The community workshops were especially designed to deepen the collective learning and innovation process, enhancing collaboration and promote positive changes in the community (Juujärvi and Lund, 2015).
Not only ideas were brought to the table; actors were also expected to take on responsibilities when working out the ideas. By doing so it aimed to establish a local model for urban development which empowers residents to participate in city planning.
Soile Juujärvi and Virpi Lund were project researchers within a core team of the Sharing and Caring project.
The project was divided in phases and the months January – May 2015 (in the final phase of the project) were focusing on community and stakeholder participation by means of community workshops. The CTP arose during the community workshops. The workshops are also described in a paper written by the interviewee and her colleague and are described there as follows: “The Community Workshops is an abbreviated application of the Change Laboratory® (CL), a formative intervention method based on the theory of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987, 2007; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). The CL has been planned to promote innovation and learning within organization but has been increasingly used in cross-boundary development. Researchers act as interventionists providing tools to participants for envisioning, designing, and experiment with novel forms of activities. The rationale behind interventions is to expand participants' understanding about the objects of development work enabling shared goals and enhancing collaboration. Each workshop has a specific purpose to deepen the collective learning and innovation process (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). In the present study, the CL method was modified for purposes for urban and community development including five successive workshops as follows: (1) Charting the current situation; (2) analyzing disturbances and conflicts in current practices of urban development; (3) shaping objects for future development; (4) planning experiments for new practices, followed by an experiment period of two months; (5) evaluation of experiments and decision making about their consolidation (Juujärvi and Lund, 2015, p.5)”.
This CTP changed the approach of the project. Laurea had style of working that was characterized by a hands on approach, very much focus on action, rather than lengthy discussions. This approach was not shared with other actors involved in the living lab project. This situation can be seen as a CTP for the project as it caused significant difficulties and had a negative impact on the development of the Caring and Sharing project. Some stakeholders could not adapt to this hands-on approach. For them it was far away from the way they were used to operate, it was not in their roots to do work this way. This made the project unsuccessful from a Living Lab perspective. This is because Laurea living lab strives for cooperation between actors which was not reached in this case.
The Laurea Living Lab Networks calls itself an 'innovation ecosystem', working together with various actors or 'social partners' as is also mentioned under 'Contents'. These actors share a common interest in developing service innovation and smart solutions in certain domains of life. The 'Sharing and Caring project' is a project that is labelled under the umbrella of the Laurea Living Lab. The Sharing and Caring project formed its own core team independently.
A total of 46 actors were involved and had to work together in the workshops in order to reach the projects’ goals as mentioned under ‘contents’. The actors included several students and four researchers of Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Espoo. Additionally there was the Department of Urban Planning, Social Services, several NGO’s operating in the area, an additional university, individual researchers, residents and resident associations. The aim for the Laurea Living Lab was to co-produce in a pro-active, knowledge based way in which every actor could contribute with their own set of skills. However, this collaboration did not work out as well as hoped for, and this made the project less successful for the Laurea Living Lab.
It was only after the project ended that the collaborating university understood what role was expected of them. According to the interviewee they expressed that they did wish to collaborate in future projects. The civil servants did not seem to understand that they could have played a bigger role and that this was actually expected from them.
There are not a lot of related events that led up to this CTP, as the actual collaboration part of the project only lasted from January until May 2015. Within these six months, five successive workshops were held. The chronological order and subject of these were as follows:
The interviewee shared her thought on what she thought could have added to the forming of this CTP. The CTP formed when different ways of working came together, but is according to the interviewee also embedded in history. Some actors where not used to working on a more ‘engaging’ basis, and had always had a more academic (University) or theoretical (Civil servants) approach. This could have led to the actors getting so used to their working practices that changing their roles proved to be too difficult. Despite of this, the interviewee found it surprising that the some of the civil servants were not able to ‘switch’ their attitude towards the project; ‘It was surprising that they [Civil servants] were not able to somehow change their roles, as it is more or less their job to work under different circumstances. (…) Their role is also to stimulate cooperation.’ It should be highlighted that this only concerned a number of civil servants; other civil servant were regarded as being very helpful and active. The civil servants in question however, were not able to adapt their roles in order to be compatible with the other actors, and this led to collaboration issues.
Laurea Living Lab tried to react to the collaboration issues in a subtle manner by trying to provoke a more pro-active attitude with the stakeholders involved, without explicitly mentioning the issue. They did so by asking more participation and input, e.g. doing different tasks for the project .The Laurea living lab attempted to steer the community workshops and its participants towards adopting this pro-active manner but this was to no avail.
This critical turning point is about the cooperation between the Living Lab project staff and the various stakeholders involved. In the Sharing and Caring project, a wide variety of stakeholders were approached in order to develop a network for regional urban development for a particular area in the city of Espoo. Some of these stakeholders were approached because of their expertise in the field, like a university, civil servants and NGO’s. These stakeholders were valuable to the Sharing and Caring Networks because they already worked with matters that were similar to the project’s focal point. Approaching these stakeholders was additionally serving the goal of establishing a tighter communication network with shared goals. Even though the stakeholders did not know each other, the cooperation was mutually profitable as these stakeholders shared common interests.
The manner in which co-production was hindered was at the heart of this critical turning point. As it seems, this was predominantly fueled by the number of actors which suddenly had to work together and align their practices. During the end stage of the Caring and Sharing project, the CTP began to form as these 46 actors had to jointly establish a local model for urban development which empowers residents to participate in city planning. Thus, the spatial context of the CTP was a situation in which suddenly a lot of mutual understanding and collaboration was of the essence. Before this collaboration, these actors were able to implement their own ideas and visions. Now that the actors had to work together, these different views collided in a stage of the project were alignment of visions was important.
Mentioned were the very academic approach of a collaborating university, which did not quite align with the views of the Laurea Living Lab [‘’They were only interested in making papers’’]. Especially since the interviewee regarded the university as a research institute, it was problematic that they did not have the pro-active attitude that the Living Lab had. "We [Laurea and university] were expected to work together quite often, and based on this experience I am not sure if I am ready to work together with them on a project again. I do not approve of their approach.’’ From this angle, it was unforeseen to the Laurea Living Lab that the collaborating university was not active [active as being more than just bringing ideas to the table, but also taking on responsibilities].
Also mentioned are civil servants, which according to the interviewee did not really understand their role within the project. The interviewee highlights that although the project spanned a period of 2,5 years, the collaborative part of the project (intentionally) only stretched the last six months. The interviewee explained that she thinks that these stakeholders had a different goal in mind when collaborating in the project. Instead of a very practical role in constructing a local network dedicated to urban development in which residents participated as well, these stakeholders thought the goal was to share information. The view these stakeholders had, continued throughout the project and hampered the collaboration between the various actors. These particular stakeholders did not know how to adapt to the role that was expected of them.
The interviewee mentions that even though they saw the CTP forming and happening at the start of the end phase, there were some unforeseen elements within this CTP. The Firstly, the Laurea Living Lab researchers perhaps had wrong expectations of the civil servants, as the interviewee explains that they held interviews with these civil servants at the beginning of the project. In these interviews, it became apparent that the civil servants could be a big player in the project. However, when the final phase of six months begun, the Living Lab researchers soon learned that it was not the intention of these civil servants to become this big player. After this, the problem was understood intuitively as the Laurea Living Lab researchers could see that the civil servants in question were not showing any change in behavior over this time period. ‘We tried to handle it, but it was not explicitly addressed to the actors that they were not following the common practices.’ The interviewee underlines that the Living Lab was not dependent on the collaboration of any actors. ‘’Actually, we were quite independent, because we played such a big role [in the project], in fact we did not expect to get so many partners.’’
For the collaboration with the university, an evaluation was planned after the project was over. Although once again not specifically addressed, Laurea has tried to share their thought on their way of working with the collaborating university, and so convey their thoughts on how to handle things in the future in a subtle way. The interviewee mentions that ‘’the problem was hard to tackle’’ and unforeseen since the collaborating university as a research institute was deemed to be more active on their own. This experience made the interviewee hesitant about future collaboration with the university. This is covered further in ‘Contestation’.
In the case of the civil servants, another scenario played out. Just like with the university, the collaboration issue was not explicitly mentioned to the civil servants. The problem was intuitively understood, but not acted upon. But, the interviewee mentioned that other actors noticed their non-participatory attitude as well and started to exclude them from the process; ‘’They [other actors] had a very strong opinion that they did not want to have people here who are not active. They did not want to have people who just bring ideas, they did not want to have people who do not want to take any responsibility. So I think other participants excluded them [the non-participatory civil servants] from the process.’’ When asking the interviewee how these civil servants were excluded she states; ‘’It was not like these civil servants were completely thrown out of the project, but their role could have been really important. They had access to some resources in the city. These resources were supplied to us by another actor later anyway, and other people would do the work we expected these civil servants to do. We had to adapt to this situation.’’
This indicates that the Laurea Living Lab did see the co-production problems unfolding when the end phase begun, and understood the consequences of it. Surprisingly, the other actors in the workshops saw the CTP happening too, but also decided to take action against the actors responsible. The fact that multiple actors noticed this CTP, indicates that the CTP at the time was widely understood.
For the civil servants, the interviewee states that she does not think that the civil servants in question even noticed that they were more or less substituted by other actors. ‘They [the civil servants that were not ‘pro-active’] seemed relieved that they did not actually have to do anything. I think they were satisfied with their input. I am not sure what went through their minds.’ As elaborated upon in ‘contestation’ and ‘anticipation’, the interviewee states that it was surprising to her that the researchers of the collaborating university were not actively involved, but more interested in the theoretical side.
For the Laurea living Lab researchers, these experiences brought an important lesson, the interviewee explains; ‘The main lesson here is that you should not expect actors to contribute according to their position. We held interviews with these actors, and based on that we noticed that they had a lot of information and held key positions. These academic researchers, but especially the civil servants were able to contribute greatly to the project, so we expected quite much of them. But already in the beginning of the workshops, we noticed that they were not open to this kind of approach.’’ Thus, the Living Lab researchers learned not to have big expectations based on high positions or the extensive knowledge of actors. Lastly, the interviewee highlights that in the future, the roles of different actors would be discussed more openly. ‘’I think we really tried addressing the situation, and the point is that it was not really an open conflict, nor a big problem. But I think we would be much more active in handling the situation.’’
References
Laurea .fi (2016) Laurea Living Lab, accessed at 5th of July 2016, https://www.laurea.fi/en/research-development-and-innovations/laurea-living-labs
Juujärvi, S. and Lund, V. (2015), Participatory Action Research as a Practice of Empowerment In Deprived Communities, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, accessed at 5th of July 2016 http://ame2015.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Soile_Juujarvi-Juujarvi_Lund-Participatory_Action_Research_as_a_practice_of_empowerment.pdf
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