On 7 and 8 October, the CO-VALUE project held its final in-person meeting in Brussels, followed by events that covered a good part of what we have been working on over the past years. Stickydot has coordinated the project from the start, so it was a special moment to see where the approach has landed, with more still to come as the project concludes.
Wednesday began with the final project meeting, followed by a networking event that brought together people who are thinking about how to make knowledge work for society, and not only for academia. The conversation was lively and more honest than these events tend to allow, and what came through is that the people in the room genuinely believe in this work. It was a reminder that there is a community out there building both the evidence and the methods to back up the idea that citizens and companies have something real to contribute to innovation.
That idea was put well by Daniel Domene López of Solublion, one of the pilots we worked with: “We thought it would be similar to some kind of market validation, but we then realized it was much more interesting than that. It was not really about asking people if they liked our product. It was about starting from their needs, their concerns, and then starting to co-design a potential solution together.”
Daniel’s description is close to how we think about co-creation in knowledge valorisation. It goes beyond market validation by bringing citizens into design, concept creation and scale-up. Citizens help ensure the societal impact of new products and services, and businesses get a more efficient path to uptake in the market.
On Thursday we attended the Knowledge Valorisation in Action: From Results to Policy workshop, organised by the European Research Executive Agency (REA) and DG Research and Innovation. The day opened with testimonials from projects putting valorisation into practice, and two of the first speakers came from our pilots: David Tomás of InferIA and Daniel Domene López of Solublion. Hearing them explain, in their own words, how the CO-VALUE methodology reshaped their business plans on the road from spin-off to impact was a highlight for us. Later in the day we spoke in the session on bringing research results to market, sharing why societal uptake matters for innovators, intermediaries and policymakers, and how to build it into the process in practice.
The project may be ending, but the work is not. We are keen to keep developing the methodology and to offer it to other start-ups and knowledge valorisation intermediaries, so if you would like to know more, get in touch.
