Field Work

LIAISON project is a highly  interactive and innovative approach that led us  to  thinking that the field work  should be something out of the ordinary. 

Thus, we created three innovative methodological  approaches to  help  us implement and reach the goal of the project: understanding successful partnerships. 

The first approach is the result of thinking  that we might end up  having a unrepresentative selection of innovation cases if we would only  rely  on the available databases. In this sense,  we organised a contest for ‘under-the-radar’ projects and initiatives – the European Rural Innovation Contest (EURIC).

Secondly, to understand what a successful partnership  actually  stands for we had to  familiarize with  various approaches that existed already. Each partner team undertook a so-called light touch review of mixed groups of innovation actors (in total 200 cases from across Europe).

The final step of our field work consist in the key questions emerging from the review process and interviews with external experts and stakeholders from innovation projects in the first instance providing  guidance for the 32 in-depth case studies.

The aim of the case studies is to  identify  not only the innovation in successful partnerships, but also  the embodiment of all this cases in different mechanisms (environment, funding, wider context and stakeholders involvement).