Learning Layers – What are we achieving with our fieldwork of Year 1 (Part 4: Concluding remarks)
In my first post to this series of blogs I raised he question: What are we achieving with the fieldwork activities of Year 1 in the Learning Layers (LL) project? In the two subsequent posts I gave an account on the developments in the co-design activities and in the training activities.
In this post I want to make three concluding remarks to complete the picture that may otherwise look a bit inward-looking and self-sufficient:
1) It is necessary to pay more attention to external support activities that can enrich the co-design and training activities – in particular the so-called Layers PBL projects;
2) It is necessary to have a closer look at the studies on regional innovation policies and the role of organised clusters (that are being carried out by the WP7 team).
3) It is necessary to pay attention to the potentials of and challenges for accompanying research.
1. Concerning the external support activities it is essential to note the valuable contribution that is provided by student groups working in the “Layers PBL” projects that work with particular tasks/apps proposed by LL partners. At the moment we have such projects working in several universities (HSKA, RWTH, Metropolia UAS). In the co-design activities and training activities of the year 2 we can count on the possibility to integrate their results into project work and to initiate new ones.
2. Concerning the studies on regional innovation policies and organised clusters, we have hosted several working visits of the WP7 team and attended to several sessions of stakeholder talks. We have also got several reports on other working visits of the WP7 team. This all has brought us closer to the understanding of regional and sectoral potentials and how to use ‘scaling up’ opportunies that are supported by other funding programmes. This is particularly important when we see the chance to involve other innovation regions with similar initiatives.
3. Concerning the role of accompanying research it is worthwhile to pay attention to the twofold relation of such research and the design/development activities. Firstly, the researchers have to be sufficiently closely involved in the design and development processes to sense the changes (progress or obstacles) in the process dynamics. Secondly, the researchers have to keep a relative distance to be able to document and analyse the developments (without being overly guided by their first impressions). In this respect the LL activities pose additional challenges to carry out the twofold duties of accompanying research in a balanced way.
I think this is enough on these issues at this moment. After the review of the Year 1 activities we need to get back to these issues when launching the Year 2 activities.
The discussion will be continued …
Acknowledgements. This work is supported by the European Commission under the FP7 project LAYERS (no. 318209), http://www.learning-layers.eu.
