Co-creation process started successfully in the Finnish Sustainable packaging hub for Engage4Bio project

On the 11th of September 2023, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and CLIC Innovation-facilitated 4Recycling open innovation ecosystem held an Engage4BIO co-creation workshop on training and mentoring under the theme of Sustainable Packaging. The objective of the workshop was to develop ideas and prototypes for concrete education activities, which support the uptake of the Sustainable Packaging regional activities, based on the project vision and strategy, gap analysis results and learning scenario initiated previously in the project.  The findings of the workshop will be incorporated into future training and mentoring design to equip stakeholders for a sustainability transition within the packaging sector.  

 The workshop participants represented different stakeholder groups from companies, universities and research organizations, public sector and civil society.    

 The key takeaways from the brainstorming were two initial training concepts: Sustainability in packaging life cycle, and Packaging materials (accessibility and characteristics). Although the workshop supported in-depth discussions, future work is required to validate the initial training concepts with a wider group of hub members. Several motivated participants emerged from the workshop to support the validation of the training concepts, which is the next step in the training development process. In addition, one of the training concepts will be published as an open education resource.   

On the 3rd of October 2023, the co-creation workshop on innovative governance models was held by CLIC Innovation. The objective was to create a project concept to identify common criteria for Sustainable Packaging and find the criteria for a collaborative platform to support the hub. The workshop participants were again from different stakeholder groups. The results of this workshop are still being processed by the project team.  

The next co-creation workshop will be arranged on 26th of October, focusing on awareness raising and knowledge gain campaigns. In the first vision workshop organised in June, three main themes were already identified. These are digital communications campaigns, event organizing and exhibitions. Various activities can be realised under these main topics, such as influencer collaboration, visiting centres or launching a national packaging week to raise awareness. These preliminary ideas will be validated in the upcoming workshop but also complemented with potential new ones. Arts and design sector and exhibition centres are new stakeholder groups invited to this workshop. 

Engage4BIO presented at CLIC Innovation events 

Engage4BIO has been presented in several CLIC Innovation events during poster sessions. The CLIC Innovation Annual Seminar was held on the 23rd of May in Helsinki. The seminar was organised under the title “Towards Sustainable Future Solutions”. All CLIC Innovation themes were presented in the speeches; this means the audience was treated with presentations about circular economy, bioeconomy and energy solutions. Engage4BIO was presented in the poster session along with other CLIC Innovation projects. Hye Jung-Majanen (MET) and Kaisa Simola (CLIC) were present to introduce the project for the interested stakeholders.  

On the 20th of September, the 4Recycling Nordic Forum was held in Helsinki and online. The title of the forum was “Towards sustainable solutions in replacing & recycling plastics”. The forum hosted three different sessions: Plastics recycling in the Nordics, Packaging and Construction and Industry talks. As Engage4BIO is part of the 4Recycling ecosystem, it was only natural for it to be presented in this poster session as well. Aila Maijanen, Teija Vainio and Tiina Laiho from CLIC Innovation were present to discuss the project with the interested parties. 

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