Contemporary grand challenges require new forms of R&D and innovation governance that extend beyond firm boundaries and traditional research institutions. Increasingly, communities are not only end-users or beneficiaries of innovation but also initiators, experimenters, and co-developers of innovative solutions.

This track focuses on the intersection of community empowerment, R&D management, and innovation ecosystems, emphasizing the processes through which community-led R&D unfolds – from early stage problem framing and participatory design to experimentation, knowledge integration and diffusion.

We invite contributions that explore how R&D processes can be democratized through participatory design, digital platforms, and cooperative governance models - understood both as collaborative approaches and as organizational forms such as cooperatives and mutual enterprises. We are also interested in how communities build absorptive capacity to engage with and apply scientific and technological knowledge; and how cross-community collaborations foster the diffusion, adaptation and scaling of socially embedded innovations.

Key Themes and Topics

Key Research Themes

1. Community Transitions and innovation Mechanisms
o How do communities move from being beneficiaries to proactive innovators and entrepreneurs?
o What cognitive, institutional, organizational mechanism enable this transformation?
o The role of leadership, collective identity, and shared narratives in mobilizing community innovation.

2. Participatory and Cooperative R&D processes
o How do participatory or cooperative frameworks - including cooperative enterprises and federated cooperative networks - reshape traditional R&D management?
o Case studies of open, community-based R&D initiatives (e.g., citizen science, living labs, cooperative tech hubs).
o Governance models for shared ownership, distributed experimentation, and collective decision- making and learning.

3. Absorptive Capacity and Knowledge Flows
o How do communities develop the capacity to understand, adapt, and use scientific and technological knowledge?
o What processes facilitate local learning, boundary spanning, and knowledge translation in participatory initiatives?
o Role of intermediaries and digital infrastructures in enabling translocal learning.

4. Cross-Community Collaboration and Scaling
o Mechanisms for translocal collaboration, diffusion, and scaling of community-led innovation.
o How federations, alliances, and meta-organizations support scaling of community-led innovation?
o Lessons from comparative studies of multi-community innovation networks.

5. Technology and Social Innovation Integration
o How digital and deep technologies (AI, IoT, data commons, platform cooperativism) interact with in community-led innovation and community-driven R&D.
o Balancing technological advancement with social inclusion and local embeddedness.
o Evaluating process impact, scalability and log-term sustainability of community-based R&D.

Objectives of the Track
• To bridge research on R&D management, innovation ecosystems, and community entrepreneurship.
• To identify processes, practices and mechanisms enabling communities to collectively generate and manage innovation.
• To explore how participatory R&D and cooperative innovation contribute to addressing grand challenges.
• To stimulate dialogue among academics, practitioners, policymakers, and community innovators on designing inclusive innovation processes and systems.

Call for Papers
We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions that address questions such as:
• How do communities build capabilities for innovation and R&D management?
• What participatory and cooperative governance models democratize R&D and enable meaningful inclusion in innovation?
• How do cooperative or federated models support innovation across communities and regions?
• How do communities build absorptive capacity to engage with scientific and technological knowledge?
• What are the roles of intermediaries, digital tools, and social technologies in structuring collective innovation?
• How can policymakers and R&D institutions design frameworks that recognize and support community-led innovation and cooperative innovation?

We particularly welcome:
• Comparative case studies of community-based or cooperative innovation ecosystems.
• Multi-level analyses of process mechanism, cross-community collaboration and diffusion.
• Methodological innovations for researching participatory R&D, community entrepreneurship and cooperative R&D.
• Papers connecting process-oriented R&D management with social innovation and entrepreneurship theories.

We encourage papers that present empirical research, theoretical frameworks, or methodological innovations and we especially welcome interdisciplinary work and collaborations between researchers and practitioners, including those from cooperative organizations, federations, public institutions and innovation intermediaries.