Facilitating collaborative priority-setting for research and innovation: a case from the food sector

Policy for science, technology, and innovation is increasingly supporting bottom-up approaches to setting strategic agendas for research and innovation (R&I). These processes are designed to bring industrial needs of R&I intensive sectors to the fore, while at the same time stimulating engagement of other relevant stakeholders, such as public and private research performers. This paper addresses the question of what conditions best facilitate the main activities of this type of ‘collaborative priority-setting’. It does so through a case study of the creation of a strategic R&I agenda in the Swedish food sector. The paper concludes that local conditions such as government resources and time availability, mixed bottom-up and top-down process steering, and complementary expertise, facilitated the priority-setting. They did so by facilitating the main activities of adjusting scope of prioritised research areas, and mapping out the R&I themes’ expected impacts, desired outcomes, and initial activities/investments. The paper suggests that insights into these ‘intermediate/micro-level relationships’ of priority-setting can assist policy-makers as well as managers aiming at creating sector consensus on R&I priorities.