Community of Practice
The Community of Practice comprises organisational champions* who have an interest in innovation and a key role in facilitating change in their industry and organisations. In particular, members of the Community of Practice are well placed to realise opportunities to increase the pace and impact of innovation in the New Zealand primary sector. The Community of Practice, in partnership with the Primary Innovation research team, plays a key role in helping to enhance innovation in the primary sector by:
- Developing and facilitating the use of new approaches to forming networks of participants who jointly learn and co-develop innovations
- Identifying and implementing, changes in our respective organisational cultures, funding frameworks, and policies to optimise the performance of these new innovation networks.
The Community of Practice support this activity by:
- Helping to evaluate the four ex-post case studies by identifying barriers to and opportunities for successful innovation based on their own experience
- Drawing on their own successes and evaluation of the four ex-post case studies, guide the implementation of these learnings with the research team, in the six on-going innovation projects in which co-innovation is being tested
- Implementing elements of the new system of co-innovation practices and tools in their own organisations and encouraging their implementation in organisations they partner with
- Using tools from the Primary Innovation programme to evaluate their own networks in order to identify how they are facilitating co-innovative practices
- Providing insights into the influence of barriers and enablers to innovation identified for New Zealand’s primary sector by participating in interviews and Community of Practice workshop discussions and helping to evaluate findings from the four ex-post case studies and six on-going innovation projects
- Creating change and influence at an institutional level.
It is intended that members of the Community of Practice remain engaged with the project throughout the five-year programme duration to maintain continuity and enable them to contribute to analysis of the four case study findings and the six on-going innovation projects as they emerge. Interaction among the Community of Practice members will be through workshops, webinars, documents and discussions shared on the Primary Innovation LinkedIn Group.
Community of Practice Online Hub
The Community of Practice now has an on-line hub to support and co-ordinate members of the Community of Practice. The hub is setup as a social network site to enable collaboration. It works to share resources, discussions and ideas. The hub is structured around the three themes from the Value Add documents, gives the Community of Practice members a chance to continue the work they began at the workshops. The idea of the hub is that various work streams can form and function as collaborations in a virtual environment. The hub enables the researchers to reflect on the various work streams as examples of co-innovation.
*Organisations that expressed an interest in participating in the Community of Practice include Future Forests Research Ltd., DairyNZ, Scion, Beef + Lamb NZ, Landcare Research, NZ Winegrowers, NIWA, OneFarm, Pipfruit NZ, Plant & Food Research, ESR, Ministry for Primary Industries, Ministry for the Environment, Potatoes New Zealand, Anzco Foods, AgResearch, Livestock Improvement Corporation, NZ Institute of Primary Industry Management, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.