The Creative Region and Its Reservoir of Ideas: State-Led Participatory Innovation in Wallonia

• In Event: Scaling Up Co-creation? The Politics of Participatory Innovation Instruments

Abstract

Especially in Europe, experiments seeking to involve publics in innovation-making processes, often called ‘co-creation’ experiments, have become frequently organised by public authorities over the last years. These experiments do not develop in a political vacuum. As they are conceived by political authorities and enacted within political territories, they are rooted in political identities and values. Building on STS works on co-production (Jasanoff 2004; Joly 2015), I critically scrutinize the relationship between co-creation experiments and the political territories in which they are developed. I follow two highly connected guiding questions: What do participatory innovation experiments do to the political territories in which they are developed? And what does the institutionalisation of participation innovation do to participatory innovation experiments?

Drawing on document analysis, semi-structured interviews and participant observations, I analyze a Walloon state-led economic programme, which organized the creation of experimental sites of participatory innovation (i.e. Fab Labs, Living Labs, Creative Hubs, Hackathons) across the Walloon region. I show how participatory innovation in Wallonia both depends on and fuels a sociotechnical imaginary of Wallonia being a reindustrialized by creativity and innovation, thereby contributing to public authorities promoting a Walloon identity of ‘creative’, ‘innovative’ and ‘smart’ territory.

I also show that this conception of participatory innovation has important consequences for the experiments that take place in state-sponsored sites, impacting the issues, publics and methods of experiments. Overall, I propose a reflection on the political-economy of (participatory) innovation, showing that co-creation experiments are conceived and enacted to extract (mostly economically) valuable ideas from citizens.

Author

• Hadrien Macq, Université de Liège