ABIS Secondment at the University of Vigo, Post-Growth Innovation Lab

In the months of February and March 2023, the ABIS – The Academy of Business in Society colleagues Karolina Sobczak, Knowledge Manager, and Katarina Haluskova, Project Communication Specialist, had the opportunity to spend one-month secondments at the University of Vigo (UVIGO), Post-Growth Innovation Lab in Pontevedra, Spain. The secondments took place under the ongoing “Exploring Plausible Circular Economy” (ExPliCit) MSCA-funded project.

As the project has officially started on January 1st 2023, these secondments were one of the first to be executed at the whole project level.

The Director of the Post-Growth Innovation Lab Dr Mario Pansera, alongside the postdoctoral researcher and the ExPliCit project lead Dr Brais Suárez Eiroa welcomed the ABIS colleagues at the UVIGO premises, introduced them to the Lab’s team of postdoctoral researchers, research fellows and PhD students and explained their individual research focuses.

After the initial orientation, our colleagues started working on the first project tasks and deliverables, namely D 1.1 A systematic review of futuring and foresight techniques.

Key project tasks during the secondment period involved:

• Identifying the scope of the project task D1.1 and the next course of action
• Reading introductory and core papers on futuring techniques
• Preparing first summary and preliminary findings from core papers
• Selecting final set of research keywords for SCOPUS search
• Finalising a list of around 500 research papers based on SCOPUS keyword search
• Narrowing down further the final list of papers to review based on reviewing titles and abstracts
• Reviewing 41 papers, distributed among Katarina Haluskova, Josep Pinyol and Karolina Sobczak
• Compiling a summary from the outcomes of the research

Alongside the core tasks, the ABIS secondees have also participated to the meetings of the organization of a 2024 International Degrowth Conference organized by University of Vigo. Additionally, Katarina and Karolina presented ABIS activities and engagement opportunities to all the colleagues of the UVIGO Lab that ultimately led to further knowledge sharing.

During their stays in Pontevedra, the secondees in their free time also had the opportunity to network and socialise with locals and explore the local gastronomy and cultural events, as well as to discover the nature and cities around Rías Baixas region.