Support your future today: enhancing sustainable transitions by experimenting at academic conferences

Abstract

Major societal changes which challenge societal functions and actors' activities are needed to enhance sustainable development. Thus sustainable transitions research emphasizes co-evolutionary approaches involving a multitude of actors including the business sector, the government, and academia. Academic research can catalyse sustainable transitions by critically analyse current societal trends to develop and disseminate new knowledge. At research conferences, researchers and practitioners meet to network and discuss recent research findings providing arenas for testing and evaluating ideas to enhance sustainable transitions. This however requires some modifications of the standard design of a research conference.Here we report learning outcomes from experimenting at the 18th international Greening of Industry Network conference during 21–24 October 2012 in Linköping, Sweden. The conference was a combination of a traditional conference structure with different interactive elements such as sustainability jam-sessions to discuss future challenges of six companies and clusters of companies at their site. The intention of doing so was to enhance learning outcomes both for visiting conference delegates and among actors in the host region. This was perceived by the participants as an innovative approach fostering both problem solving and creation of new ideas. Four out of the six companies continued dialogues about sustainable production fields or bio-refineries with Linköping University.In addition we introduce and summarize research findings presented at the conference which were further developed into research articles. The essence of these articles covers sustainable industry management; cleaner production; industrial ecology; cooperation between industry, governments and academics; dissemination of concepts and technologies; methods and tools for modelling and measuring of industrial symbiosis, CO2 performance and eco-efficiency.