For the last year NEON has been participating the BRIDGE initiative providing input about the experiences gained in the pilots. The Consumer and Citizen Engagement Working Group (CCE WG) where NEON has been collaborating, is part of the BRIDGE H2020 initiative, and it aims at creating a structured understanding of the role and methodologies of stakeholder engagement activities in European Research & Innovation (R&I) projects. 

NEON has been actively informing about its experiences to the two subgroups: first to the Bridge Strategies of Engagement sub-group. In this group in the coming days we will organise a session/webinar in March in which to discuss “Strategies of Engagement”, ie. what works in engaging stakeholders – with special focus on citizens and/or consumers. So keep tuned to get the information soon. We have also prepared a Bridge SoE Engagement Handbook that soon will se light. The Consumer and Citizen Engagement Working Group (CCE WG) meets regularly to discuss nd find better ways to engage citizens in the research and innovation projects as well as to disseminate among the general population the results of such activities.

The Bridge Strategies of Engagement sub-group also hosted on the 21st November an online “Failure workshop” – a session where discussions about common problems we face in engagement work and to find solutions to them. Attendees listened and discussed about typical moments of “engagement failure” in R&I projects. We had an opportunity to share our thoughts in a confidential environment with like-minded people. A significant part of the workshop was  reserved for discussions in small groups about common challenges or difficulties in engagement. 

The second sub-group is the Indicators of engagement. In this sub-group we worked on to the development of a kind of “tools”:

1.       Taxonomy of the most occurring problems projects are facing when it comes to measuring indicators of engagement over time together with suggestions on how these problems can be reduced

2.       Taxonomy of different indicators of engagement over time, including pros and cons of these indicators and suggestions on when they are most useful or not useful at all (in terms of different kind of projects, user groups, time points of a project, etc.)

All participants in the group provide their insights from their respective projects and we are preparing a report that will be ready soon. We have been also exploring core psychological theories and conceptual frameworks that can help us understand engagement and how to measure it: Design for well-being, the Transformation Flower Approach, CSIRO Framework, and Self Determination Theory among others.

You can download the report from last year efforts on the official site:

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/2222ec21-6ef9-11ee-9220-01aa75ed71a1

The new report from 2023 will be out soon, so keep an eye on our social media so you can get the right info.