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Primary Innovation is a 5-year collaborative initiative demonstrating and evaluating co-innovation, a systemic approach to innovation addressing complex problems, in five “innovation projects” (active case studies) in different agricultural industries. In defining the elements of co-innovation, Primary Innovation has emphasized nine principles that guide activity in the innovation projects. To understand how useful these principles were in guiding practice, and their influence on co-innovation, project participants assessed and reflected on how the principles were applied in practice, issues that arose, how each influenced the project, and how important each principle was perceived as being in influencing project outcomes. The nine principles should be understood in each individual project’s context because their appropriateness and usefulness were affected by the type of problem being addressed and the stage of the project. It was also evident that they need to be built into the process from the outset.

Innovation platforms (IPs) that support agricultural innovation to enable transition processes towards more sustainable agriculture provide a space where conflicts of interest among actors in the existing agricultural system (the so called incumbent regime) may play out. Sometimes these conflicts over how actors will benefit from an action are not revealed until actors are brought together. However, a barrier to change occurs when IP actors use their existing power to mobilise resources to influence if and how individual and collective interests are aligned. In the context of agricultural innovation and transitions, this paper uses the power in transitions framework (Avelino and Wittmayer, 2016), along with analytical perspectives on conflicts and role perceptions, to understand how consciously staging or revealing conflicts of interest among IP actors changed role perceptions and power relations among these actors. The paper explores this topic in two IPs addressing agricultural production and sustainability challenges in New Zealand's agricultural sector. Conflicts were staged in IPs when one group of actors mobilised resources that enabled them to move existing power relations from one-sided, to synergistic or a mutual dependency. This enabled conflicts to be acknowledged and solved. In contrast, conflicts were not staged when actors mobilised resources to maintain antagonostic power relations. Our cases demontrate that staging conflicts to change actors' role perceptions is an important intermediary step to forming new power relations in the agricultural system. Our findings highlight the need for IP theory to conceptualise power relations in IPs as context specific, dynamic and a force shaping outcomes, rather than solely a force exerted by actors in the incumbent regime over IP actors.

An Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) approach is currently being used to determine whether the adoption of agricultural innovations in New Zealand can be enhanced. Important elements of the innovation systems approach include the participatory application of a co-innovation process, for example inclusiveness and a focus on transformative change, to remove barriers in the creation and uptake of sustainable innovations. Alongside AIS, novel evaluation approaches are being used, namely reflexive monitoring. Thus, the role of a reflexive monitor has been trialled to help understand and guide the co-innovation process. A reflexive monitor helps innovation networks challenge and change assumptions, practices, and underlying institutions in the design or management of a project, through an on-going process of evaluation in an action research setting. In this article, experiences of reflexive monitoring conducted within a research programme in New Zealand are shared. Information was gathered from workshops, meetings and interviews with reflexive monitors. Insights include the need to understand that there is no recipe for the role of a reflexive monitor, that is the role is context-dependent. However, focussing on developing solutions to a problem and taking a flexible, adaptive approach are essential elements in ensuring that monitoring and evaluation are effective.

Reflexive monitors (RMs) have been found to be vital to the success of co-innovation projects. While the practices utilized by RMs have been examined in various contexts, we examine the roles they have played in a new cultural context in New Zealand (NZ) and how it has been possible to embed these roles in a diverse range of innovation projects in the primary sector. This article will address this gap in terms of explaining the case-specific behaviours that have been utilized in six different co-innovation projects in the NZ agricultural innovation system. Qualitative data from interviews with five RMs will be used to argue that RMs are a key component in the co-innovation process and are required to play diverse roles depending on project circumstances to enhance system innovation – for example, devil’s advocate, project supporter, consensus seeker, conflict mediator, critical enquirer or encourager. The findings have implications for the characteristics that make a good RM in terms of openness to new ideas, facilitation and critical thinking skills and how they report on the practice of monitoring a project reflexively utilizing monitoring and evaluation techniques.