Setting up a community of practice on bioeconomy in Spain – looking back at 3 years of experience
The focus of the Spanish bioeconomy hub lies on innovation and networking within the Agri-food sector.
The Spanish Hub was set up by taking advantage of the system created for the development of the Andalusian Bioeconomy Strategy. In this sense ceiA3 as an active stakeholder of this strategy as well as an actor with considerable knowledge about bioeconomy in the region, decided to configure the hub as a complementary community of practice that will improve the general communication of the bioeconomy among the general public.
Our first step towards setting up the Spanish hub was to contact the main representatives of the quadruple helix of the region regarding bioeconomy and creating a core group of experts who will co-lead together with ceiA3 the design and implementation of the co-creation workshops. In order to make the core group of experts totally understand the methodology of co-creation, ceiA3 organised co-creation workshops with the core group as participants. Parallel to the co-creation workshops that are underway, the collaboration with similar projects also targeting bioeconomy is considered was crucial for the Spanish Hub. For example the collaboration with BIOVOICES made the activities implemented by the hub more visible and extended and improved the networking of Bloom. Another key activity of the Spanish Hub was to support the different institutions and organisations that were part of the hub in including the bioeconomy outreach activities in their agendas, for the joint implementation.
The co-creation activities in the Spanish hub enabled us to provide an informal space where experts used to working together in other bioeconomy networks in Andalusia have been able to discuss, debate and co-create about how to improve the awareness and the knowledge about bioeconomy. Also the methodology, open and adaptable to the participants and the development of the work done in previous workshops allowed us to go deeper in some aspects as thinking about the more suitable outreach activities or target groups for instance.
Regarding the outreach activities, both the organisation and implementation has been a lot of fun. They allowed to test the effectiveness of the co-creation processes in the sense that some of the outreach activities came as a result of these workshops.
From the Spanish hub it is worth noting that the outreach activities, like the Innovation Route or the Teacher´s Pack, were very effective. They allowed participants to engage in a dialogue and helped to raise awareness, connecting different sectors.
