Organising Innovation as a New Commons: Eliciting Perspectives, Practices and Tensions in Multi-Stakeholder Experimentations

This paper explores how innovation is organised as a new commons within place-based experimental settings characterised by institutional plurality. Drawing on scholarship on commons, commoning, and transformative innovation, we approach innovation as a collectively produced resource whose organisation becomes complex in contexts where market, state, and civil-society logics coexist. Empirically, we examine a nascent innovation district in which organisational arrangements remain unsettled, and actors articulate competing claims about participation, authority, and collective benefit. Using Q methodology, we identify four coexisting configurations—collaborative commoning, controlled coordination, networked autonomy, and public custodianship—through which stakeholders make sense of organising innovation as a shared resource. These configurations highlight how innovation as a new commons is constituted through tensions between inclusion and efficiency, formalisation and openness, and directionality and autonomy. We suggest that innovation is organised as a new commons through competing organising configurations that prefigure potential organisational choices, rather than through institutional design alone.