Collaborative Open Innovation Processes in Canadian Agriculture: Exploring Agroecosystem Living Labs

Governments have been facing an increased urgency in many policy problems and an intensifying complexity in the issues and number of actors involved in them. Old ways of governing and policymaking need to evolve to meet present day policy needs. More collaborative policy instruments and governance approaches are necessary to reflect the complexity and fluidity of policy issues. One such example is living labs which are open innovation networks centred on users, public-private-people partnerships, and real-life experimental setups. In 2018, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada developed the Agroecosystem Living Lab (ALL) to stimulate and encourage the adoption and the scaling up and out of innovation in both technology and practice as it relates to climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has been progressively rolling out five ALL sites across the country over a five year period. The ALL sites are being used as tools to accelerate the implementation of climate change adaptation and mitigation practices and technologies on Canadian farms by engaging farmers and stakeholders as partners in solution development from the beginning. This paper explores living labs as a new and inclusive collaborative policy tool that has the potential to build trust between different actors in the agricultural system and legitimacy through policy co-creation. This paper will answer the following questions: what can collaborative policy tools, like agroecosystem living labs, reveal about the processes of open innovation in the public sector? What are some opportunities and challenges of using the living lab approach as a collaborative policy instrument to solve wicked policy issues? Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this paper will gather interim observations from various ALL partners in two Canadian ALL sites (Atlantic and Eastern Prairies) to discuss preliminary observations about the effectiveness of collaborative policy instruments. Through this, early lessons outlining the benefits and challenges of using and implementing this new collaborative policy approach will be shared.