PG Student Seminar Series
Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation
Friday 23rd February 2018, 12 noon - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 1.06, Old Surgeons' Hall
Applying co-innovation to anticipate the scaling pathway in New Zealand's agri-food sector
Sam Beechener (PhD Candidate, Land Economy, Environment & Society, SRUC)
The scaling pathway crosses technological, network and institutional dimensions and involves elements of out-scaling (expanding the community of users or area covered), and up-scaling (creating a facilitating environment). The more complex the innovation or contested the context then the more problematic the scaling pathway and the more finely-balanced the dynamics between out-scaling and up-scaling become. Striking a balance that works requires a willingness to learn through scaling. In the agri-food sector, for the context-specific requirements of fields, farms and regions to inform wider innovation activity requires the global and local to be joined-up and communicating. Inspired by Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) thinking, co-innovation has been proposed as a way of applying a context-specific, collaborative approach to complex problems. Previous work on co-innovation has tended to concentrate on early phases of development, this paper adds new knowledge by extending the focus to later, scaling phases. Using data sourced from a case-study of co-innovation at the increasingly contested interface between agriculture and the environment in New Zealand, I explore how co-innovation anticipates scaling and find evidence of synergies between the requirement to learn through scaling and a commitment to reflexivity embedded in the co-innovation approach. This appears to give co-innovation leverage in the scaling process.
Stories from the “open science revolution”: how scientists talk about openness
Rosalind Attenborough (PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh STIS)
In recent decades, scientists and other researchers around the world have faced a growing moral-epistemic imperative to be “open” in their work. Open access publishing, open archiving of primary research data, open peer review, and open notebook science are some of many “open science” practices that are gaining salience. Movement towards such practices has often been led from within scientific communities – by scientist-activists and entrepreneurs who see the Internet an opportunity to “open up” and fix seemingly broken aspects of the scientific system. Now, the “open” imperative is also top-down, as funding regimes and institutions increasingly treat open access and open data as mandatory. My work focuses on the people – scientists – whose professional and epistemic worlds are undergoing transformation in this open science “revolution”. While some scientists are the leaders of open movements, the majority are more ambivalent and slow to adopt open practices, forming a “cultural” barrier to openness that is rarely explored in empirical depth. Based on my in-progress PhD data collection – qualitative interviews with (biological) scientists, and open science advocates and policymakers – I will explore the diverse meanings of scientific openness that scientists have constructed before, within, and in tension with open advocacy and policy agendas.
All students and staff welcome!
For more information, please contact:
Ros Attenborough (s1562082@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Anna Kuslits (s1469844@sms.ed.ac.uk)