Our workshop in the EBN Congress in Riva del Garda this year started with a full room and a practical question: how can business support organisations bring citizens and society more meaningfully into innovation pathways?

The pre-programme workshop, powered by the CO-VALUE project coordinated by Stickydot, brought together EU|BICs and business support practitioners to look at exactly that. Participants shared experiences of where they already involve people beyond the usual circles, where that engagement tends to break down, and what holds it back. The format was designed to be candid and hands-on, and the conversations reflected that.

The Congress theme this year was human-centric innovation, which connects directly to what Stickydot is about, and what CO-VALUE is working on: helping innovations go through a societal reality check, and building co-creation processes that link what gets developed to what people actually need. Seeing that framing gain traction in business support and scale-up contexts, not only in research, is a meaningful shift.

For a theme that can easily stay at the level of rhetoric, it was good to spend an hour on the practical detail of what it actually takes, and to do it with a room full of people who work in this space every day.