CO-VALUE’s training programme is designed to strengthen the capacities of knowledge valorisation actors, ensuring that valorisation efforts are effectively directed towards societal and economic value creation and equipping participants with the skills needed to transfer research and innovation results into society.

A variety of organisations and intermediaries, such as science parks, technology parks, digital innovation hubs and regional agencies, engage societal actors in experimentation practices that aim to support the market uptake and growth of university spinoffs and startups at an early stage. To be effective, such practices need to align with the fast pace of innovation and integrate skills and methods from different disciplines.

At the heart of this approach is a simple but powerful insight: engaging citizens and society strengthens innovation pathways and improves the chances that what gets built is actually adopted and ready to scale. Beyond technology validation, there is a growing need to test the desirability of products and services with a broader public, learn from citizens’ feedback, and adapt value propositions to improve prospects for collaborating with industrial partners, attracting investors, and growing locally and internationally.

Citizen engagement is not only relevant in research settings, it speaks directly to the competitiveness and scale-up potential of the organisations that knowledge valorisation intermediaries support. Concretely, this means working on the societal readiness of innovation, designing co-creation processes built for innovation settings and running participatory processes that surface the societal implications, latent needs and real-world trade-offs that technical development alone cannot reach.

The CO-VALUE training offer builds on formats tested locally in Alicante and Emilia-Romagna and makes direct use of project outcomes: the self-assessment tool, the co-valorisation Canvas, the experimentation pilots and the lessons learned from them.

The modular programme covers multiple dimensions of participatory practice, including the evolving European framework for citizen engagement in knowledge valorisation, methodological approaches, case studies from CO-VALUE pilots, facilitation, citizen recruitment, IP management, recognition and rewarding of stakeholders’ contributions, and ex ante and ex post co-assessment.