Structural Activity Line 3: Disseminating to and Interacting with Stakeholders
Coordinator: Phil Cooke (Cardiff)

An important dimension of the activities of DIME is the exchange of knowledge and practices between the scientific communities of the network and the societal stakeholders in the field that DIME studies. These stakeholders are of an extraordinary diversity and one of the challenges is to work with these stakeholders and to benefit not only from their experiences but also from their diversity. DIME targets three types of stakeholders:

• policy makers, policy decision makers and designers, belonging directly to the policy arena or to their supporting staff. They are situated at the local, regional, national and European / International scenes. They belong to governmental, or non-governmental organisations, to public administrations as well as to private ones; they are national or regional specific or generic
• businesses, sometimes connected in networks, integrated. Usually, this category is limited to private firms. But DIME also targets their associations, their consulting firms, their specific training organisations (such as Enterprise specific universities...)
• the 'local actors', i.e. all the actors at the regional and local levels. They include development agencies (at regional and local levels), civil service officers, university/industry transfer personnel.

For each of the three types of stakeholders, DIME has specific activities aimed at dissemination:

• For policy makers (and others, in particular the general public), DIME will present on a regular basis it’s so-called policy reports on selected topics, prepared by some of the most senior and esteemed members of DIME, in collaboration with non-DIME members of the same calibre. The regular European Work Seminars, which are aimed at mixing academic and industry and business specialists also fall in this category.
• Industry. The interaction between practitioners and academics is traditionally made difficult by the adoption of rather idiosyncratic methods, languages and mindsets. DIME proposes to fill the gap between practice and science by identifying specific boundary objects that will enable researchers and practitioners to define a common language to interact, while retaining their specific cognitive approaches to problem solving. A boundary object is an artefact, a document or a concept that can help people from different communities build a shared understanding. The notion of 'modularity' is taken as a first attenpty to specify such a boundary object.
• Local actors and policy makers. DIME selects regional policies as the locus of interaction with policy makers in the knowledge economy. Development Agencies throughout Europe and beyond are facing unprecedented pressures to change their inherited modes of operation in the face of globalisation, the knowledge economy and the imperatives to boost innovative entrepreneurship. DIME's objective here is not only to disseminate knowledge resulting from its research actions, but moreover to interact and share experiences with the local actors and facilitate the co-evolving of understanding among them.