Professor, Sustainability, Innovation and Policy, Aalborg University.

My interest in Field Stations for the Future grows directly out of work I lead at Aalborg University on Field Labs on small and medium-sized islands. Alongside city-area development research, I am actively engaged in setting up and connecting island-based field labs, among them Lab Vlieland (NL), the Ameland Energy Quarter (NL), the Schiermonnikoog Water Transition Programme (NL), the Samsø Energy Academy (DK), and the Bornholm Circularity Programme with BOFA (DK). Through NESSIE and FREIIA — two EU Interreg North Sea projects I am partner in — these individual field labs are tied together methodologically, exchanging tools and lessons on energy-transition education and circular-economy governance across island communities.

This work is not confined to the North Sea and Baltic region. As Dutch Regional Partner in the European Commission’s CE4EUI initiative — a programme connecting some 30 pioneer islands across Europe on clean-energy transition — I see the North Sea/Baltic cluster as one node within a much larger, EU-wide constellation of island field labs, each testing comparable transition processes under different geographic, cultural and institutional conditions.

Two tools developed within this network — the Rudder Method and the TIPPING Guide — help island communities, civil servants and regional transition teams turn local ideas into structured transition projects and assess their own innovation governance capacity. Both rest on a quadruple-helix approach: universities, public authorities, NGOs and businesses as equal partners, not a top-down delivery model. At the core of this approach lies what I call Spark Innovation: rather than importing ready-made solutions, the role of the field lab and its network is to spark local initiative — surfacing latent ideas within a community, giving them structure and legitimacy, and then connecting them to peer sites where similar sparks are being tested, so that lessons travel faster than any single project could generate them alone.

I see this island-based, methodology-driven strand of work as complementary to the majority of initiatives in Chris Ryan’s regenerative network. Where much of that network’s focus — exemplified by the Anglesea Alcoa site — centres on large-scale, single-site physical and ecological transformation, our field labs offer a distributed, replicable model: many smaller nodes across Europe, each testing governance and community-engagement processes that can then be transferred between sites. FSF, in this sense, could become the connective layer linking single landmark transformation sites with this wider, networked constellation of island field labs already generating comparable knowledge on regeneration, energy transition and water management.

Aalborg University: https://www.en.plan.aau.dk/research/sustainability-innovation-policy