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The purpose of this paper is to shed light on co-creative approaches for place innovation in an Arctic town, based on the relocation of Kiruna’s city center in northern Sweden. Three cases of co-creative innovation processes in Kiruna are investigated and compared: an R&D project about local perceptions and visions of attractive urban environments; an R&D project about norm-creative design principles for inclusive and attractive urban design; and an R&D project about cross-industrial synergies for city center attractiveness.

The study’s research design encompasses a comparative and participatory approach. The comparative approach implies investigation and comparison of three cases of co-creative innovation processes in Kiruna. The participatory approach implies joint development of new knowledge by researchers and local actors. The data consists of participatory observations of workshops and qualitative interviews with local actors.

The study reveals that the studied processes have harnessed the city center relocation as an opportunity to make Kiruna more attractive to residents and visitors, by using the co-creative approaches of Living Lab, Now-Wow-How and Norm-creative design. These approaches have enabled experts and local actors to jointly identify excluding patterns and norms in the relocation process and to envision inclusive and attractive (re-)configurations and (re-)conceptualizations of the future Kiruna.

The results add to the academic strand of inclusive urban transformation, by providing insights into co-creative approaches for re-imagining an Arctic town in times of industrial and social change. New insights are provided regarding how the geographical, industrial and cultural identity of an Arctic town can be harnessed to envision new configuration, content and communication that is attractive and accessible for a diversity of residents and visitors.

The results highlight the potential to harness Arctic and rural characteristics in the promotion of urban attractiveness and public well-being, especially when combined with co-creative identification and transformation of excluding norms and patterns.

The results provide new insights into how co-creative approaches may facilitate innovative and inclusive renewal of towns and cities in the Arctic and beyond.

The implementation of mobile health (mHealth) in developing countries seems to be stuck in a pattern of successive pilot studies that struggle for mainstream implementation. This study addresses the research question: what existing health-related structures, properties and practices are presented by rural areas of developing countries that might inhibit the implementation of mHealth initiatives?

This study was conducted using a socio-material approach, based on an exploratory case study in West Africa. Interviews and participant observation were used to gather data. A thematic analysis identified important social and material agencies, practices and imbrications which may limit the effectiveness of mHealth apps in the region.

Findings show that, while urban healthcare is highly structured, best practice-led, rural healthcare relies on peer-based knowledge sharing, and community support. This has implications for the enacted materiality of mobile technologies. While urban actors see mHealth as a tool for automation and the enforcement of responsible healthcare best practice, rural actors see mHealth as a tool for greater interconnectivity and independent, decentralised care.

This study has two significant limitations. First, the study focussed on a region where technology-enabled guideline-driven treatment is the main mHealth concern. Second, consistent with the exploratory nature of this study, the qualitative methodology and the single-case design, the study makes no claim to statistical generalisability.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to adopt a socio-material view that considers existing structures and practices that may influence the widespread adoption and assimilation of a new mHealth app. This helps identify contextual challenges that are limiting the potential of mHealth to improve outcomes in rural areas of developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the politics involved in local struggles against forestry extractivism. The forestry sector is dependent on vast areas of land for tree plantations. This creates deep-rooted conflicts between global corporations that seek access to natural resources and locals whose way of life requires the use of the same land.

This study draws on a political ontology frame of reference and storytelling methodology to build on testimonies of three small-scale farmers who actively seek to resist forestry plantations next to their land in rural Uruguay. The stories reveal the impossibilities they face when raising claims in the public political sphere and how they lack the means to organise strong collective resistance.

One of the testimonies reveals how the farmers engage in a form of “politics of place” (Escobar, 2001, 2008) to counter the power of the proponents of forestry and the further expansion of plantations. This form of politics strengthens and politicises the ontological difference between extractive and non-extractive worlds. The farmers seek to build new imaginations of rural living and sustainable futures without the presence of extractive corporations. They fulfil this aim by designing community projects that aim to revitalise ancient indigenous legends, set up agro-ecological farms, and teach schoolchildren about the environment.

The struggles of the farmers indicate the territorial transformations involved in (un)making (non)extractive places and the need to expand the analysis of the politics involved in struggles against extractivism beyond social struggles.

The authors investigate the contributions of social capital (SC) dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) in crowdfunding campaigns by comparing the dynamics of agri-food businesses with those of two other sectors – cultural and technological.

The authors develop linear regressions on a proprietary data set of 5,290 projects launched on the Italian platform “Produzionidalbasso.com”, from 2014 to 2020.

The authors’ findings suggest that combining the three social capital dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) has a more substantial overall effect on the number of backers involved in agri-food projects than in cultural and technological projects. Agri-food entrepreneurs effectively mobilize all resources embedded in the SC dimensions and therefore create the conditions to develop new ties that financially support the project.

Agri-food entrepreneurs may benefit from those results improving their funding strategies. Therefore, agri-food entrepreneurs can explore and exploit the instruments available on the CFD platform – video and rewards associated with the campaign – gaining more benefit from the backers involved compared with other project categories.

The study proposes a broader perspective regarding SC that encompasses the proponent, the company and the campaign with three different types of ties: bonding, bridging and linking. These SC dimensions can differently shape diverse sectors and this eclectic configuration can differentiate the effects of SC in crowdfunding campaigns. This study pinpoints how crowdfunding determinants change, based on project categories.

The paper aims to analyze the relevance of networking and social capital in promoting the adoption of sustainable innovation, then reinforcing trajectories of multifunctional agriculture. It puts forwards a systemic perspective by focusing on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems. More precisely, we share the idea of “micro agricultural knowledge and innovation systems”, by addressing ambidexterity as engine for boosting sustainable innovation.

Empirical analysis is focused on sustainable innovation adopted by young farmers in Italy and on the mediation effect of ambidextrous relations in performing innovation adoption. Ambidextrous relations are analyzed within at the micro-AKIS level, through the lens of social capital. Relationships between social capital and innovation adoption are statistically measured.

The analysis shows how ambidexterity develops a mediation effect, with a strong impact on the farm's innovative capacity. Actually, our results confirm that ambidextrous relations reveal good performance and stimulate innovation and, consequently, farms' competitiveness, alongside the path of multifunctional agriculture. As a consequence, the relevance of networking activity in adoption of sustainable innovation may address possible policy action with the aim to strengthen ambidexterity and farm's innovativeness.

The paper tries to fill a gap in literature, by focusing on micro-AKIS which are explored through the lens of social capital.

The purpose of this paper is to review the establishment of Primary Health Network (PHN) in Australia and its utility in commissioning Primary Health Care (PHC) services.

This study is an analysis of management practice about the establishment and development of a PHN as a case study over the three-year period. The PHN is the Hunter New England and Central Coast PHN (HNECCPHN). The study is based on “insiders perspectives” drawing from documentation, reports and evaluations undertaken.

HNECCPHN demonstrates a unique inclusive organisation across a substantial diverse geographic area. It has taken an innovative and evidence-based approach to its creation, governance and operation. HNECCPHN addresses the health challenges of a substantial Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander population. It contains significant and diverse urban, coastal and distinct rural, regional and remote populations. It can be described as a “virtual” organisation, using a distributed network of practice approach to engage clinicians, communities and providers. The authors describe progress and learning in the context of theories of complex organisations, innovation, networks of practice, knowledge translation and social innovation.

The study provides initial publication into the establishment phase of a PHN in Australia.

The study describes the implementation and progress in terms of relevant international practice and theoretical concepts. This paper demonstrates significant innovative practice in the short term.

The study describes significant engagement and the importance of that with and between communities, service providers and health professionals.

This is the first study of the results of the implementation of an important change in the funding and delivery of PHC in Australia.

This study looked at the potential applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) for inclusive community development and participation, sustainable tourism, and rural community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in sub-Saharan Africa and other rural areas worldwide.

To evaluate resource management systems for rural tourism and the environment in Africa and abroad. The study makes use of reviews of relevant literature and documents, and while linking applications for sustainable tourism and local community empowerment with CBNRM and GIS, vital content was manually analyzed.

The study shows a potential affinity between agricultural and tourism businesses that GIS in line with the CBNRM conception can strengthen. In many rural and underdeveloped regions of the continent, this highlights the need for a credible and varied tourism strategy to develop and empower the relevant communities.

Most agricultural communities in Africa are located in low-income regions. Such areas are rich in natural wildlife and have popular tourist destinations. A mix of regional community development initiatives can be built using GIS, sustainable tourism, CBNRM, and community-based tourism (CBT).

Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

This study examines innovation configurations (i.e. sets of product/service, social and business model innovations) and configuration linkages (i.e. factors that help to combine innovations) across six organizations as contingent upon organizational structure.

Using semi-structured interviews and available public information, qualitative data were collected and examined using content analysis to characterize innovation configurations and linkages in three local/private organizations and three foreign-led/public-private partnerships in Repiblik Ayiti (Haiti).

Organizations tend to combine product/service, social, and business model innovations simultaneously in locally founded private organizations and sequentially in foreign-based public-private partnerships. Linkages for simultaneous combination include limited external support, determined autonomy and shifting from a “beneficiary mindset,” and financial need identification. Sequential combination linkages include social need identification, community connections and flexibility.

The generalizability of our findings for this qualitative study is subject to additional quantitative studies to empirically test the suggested factors and to examine other health care organizations and countries.

Locally led private organizations in low- and middle-income settings may benefit from considering how their innovations are in service to one another as they may have limited resources. Foreign based public-private partnerships may benefit from pacing their efforts alongside a broader set of stakeholders and ecosystem partners.

This study is the first, to our knowledge, to examine how organizations combine sets of innovations, i.e. innovation configurations, in a healthcare setting and the first of any setting to examine innovation configuration linkages.