The inventory consists of two parts. The first part is a summary of innovation types and governance of innovation factors across European socio-economic conditions and institutions, which includes a biophysical and institutional data inventory. The biophysical data was collected from several sources, mapping the supply of the following forest ecosystem services (FES) across the entire EU: wood, water supply, erosion control, pollination, habitat protection, soil formation, climate regulation and recreation. The institutional mapping was carried out to identify future societal demand for FES. The information gathered was innovation types, governance mechanisms and actor’s rights and responsibilities related to FES in Europe and can be found in ANNEX 2 Database of institutional analysis. This part also includes a link to the visual database presented as maps.

The second part is a manuscript about Mapping Europe’s institutional landscape for forest ecosystem service provision, innovations and governance. This paper analyzes how

national strategies on forest, biodiversity and bio-economy address FES as a path to bridge the gap between the mapping and assessing of ecosystem services (ES) with an

empirical understanding of the institutional landscape of ES provision across multiple governance contexts. The analysis of how biophysical supply of FES is connected to

policies paying attention to ES shows that supply of provisioning ES can result in strategies emphasizing many innovations, but little supply of regulating ES could trigger

service innovations and several governance mechanisms.

The videos can be useful for optimizing public relations activities, promoting project initiatives, engaging stakeholders, reaching local communities as well as for training and educating other partners and interested individuals. Seven short project videos (six to seven minutes long) were produced: six to showcase the different innovation regions of InnoForESt, and one to introduce the overall concept of InnoForESt and highlight the innovative efforts for the provision, use, and management of forest ecosystem services in general. The videos are aimed for a) encouraging broader participation of other practitioners and beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services, and b) for contributing to an increased sense of ownership among the project partners involved

There were 13 steps in the production of the videos, from preparing the outline and script, selecting interviewees, setting up the equipment and choosing the setting, recording, collection of topic-related or site-specific pictures and other visual material, composing texts for headlines and editing (with comments from other contributing partners), communicating with the editing team (a full-service webcasting company specialized in video production), finalizing edits with comments, payment, and incorporation onto the website (may require IT experience to fit larger files).

Sharing a project overview and information about the different innovation regions will allow interested parties to get an idea about the innovations and how they are planned to get further developed. Each video can help attack the audience to the region and bring a more personal touch, fostering prototype replication strategy.

The use of social media in organizations or projects, such as InnoForESt, can create public engagement and feedback from the interested users/followers by communicating more directly and more personally than through many other forms of dissemination. People interested in the project can message project partners directly through Facebook, or ask questions on Twitter, or watch videos on YouTube and comment below them. These methods are upgrades over more traditional means for dissemination such as through scholarly papers or mass media, which are usually only one-sided in their dissemination and tailored to a specific clientele such as the scientific community.

In order to make social media content regarding the prototypes appealing to a wider audience, the innovation teams could use a story format to present their region and innovations, highlighting the uniqueness of their approach and how it could be used by other regions. It is also recommended to include lots of visual materials since they increase the likelihood of views, likes, and re-tweets. The content should be adapted to the target group: For instance, in the case of the Swedish innovation ‘Love the Forest’, since it is aimed at children, the social media push would likely be more focused on fun aspects. By contrast, the value chain approach in Austria is addressed at adults, who (though also wanting to be entertained) will be likely more interested in numbers, profit, value, and the economic side of things.

In addition, by using Google Analytics and/or Twitter Analytics on a regular basis, InnoForESt would be able to review what is working and what is not for the project as well as seeing where the audience is coming from might can help to plan what sort of material would be best provided.

The stakeholder analysis serves as an empirical and analytical tool which helps to identify, map, and integrate a diversity of stakeholder’s interests, visions, and concerns in the context of both the governance innovations pursued in the innovation regions and the innovation platforms to be established. In InnoForESt, stakeholders include any group (e.g. organized civil society actors) or individual (e.g. citizen) who actually or potentially can affect or is/are affected by the governance innovation targeted in a respective innovation region at the various levels and in the different areas.

The methods for stakeholder analysis used in InnoForESt have different aims. First, to create a broad and rather comprehensive list of stakeholders and stakeholder types, who are potentially relevant for fostering or hampering the governance innovation process in the innovation regions. Second, to provide an extensive overview of analytic categories to be covered by the empirical analysis, i.e., the potentially relevant stakeholder characteristics. Third, to suggest a diverse set of empirical approaches, from which the innovation teams can choose when planning the stakeholder analysis.

The combination of methods that could be chosen depends mostly on the time and available staff for undertaking the analysis. Results can take very different forms depending, on the comprehensiveness and extent of the information gathered and the specific purposes of the stakeholder analysis. All in all, results can ensure the proper representation of relevant types of stakeholders and their characteristic or interests in the different stages of the innovation.

Focus groups are a specific kind of interview which works with several participants and a moderator or facilitator. In general, this group interview emphasizes a specific topic which is explored in-depth based on individual inputs from the different participants. The aim of conducting several focus groups is to establish whether there is any systematic variation in the ways in which different groups with particular attributes discuss a certain topic.

One important element is that participants have the chance to question each other’s viewpoints, ending up with a more realistic perspective of the different aspects of the discussed topic. Additionally, this method allows the mutual construction of a meaning and examine the ways in which people interpret the chosen topic together, while probing each other’s reasons for holding a certain point of view.

In InnoForESt, a focus group could be one which brings together different categories of stakeholders such as forest managers, forest owners, and policy makers concerned with deciding and implementing forest-related policies, who did not interact with each other before. A diverse group of people who do not know each other are less likely to operate with taken for granted assumptions and will question each other’s viewpoint more thoroughly.

With this method, it is possible to explore the stakeholder’s points of view and the perspectives of the strengths and weaknesses of an existing innovation as well as the perspectives on several alternative prototypes of an innovation. However, the documentation is more difficult compared to individual interviews, as it is harder to keep track of who says what in the recordings and the amount of data to be analyzed can be very large.

Interviews are one of the most popular data collection methods in social research, giving the opportunity to collect the data in a conversation-like situation between interviewer and interviewee. There are several kinds of interview however, direct personal interaction offers better opportunities for people to develop affinity and form a connection. When using this method, the interviewer documents the information provided by the interviewee, either by taking notes on paper or by recording the conversation. This information will be later transcribed for further analysis.

In InnoForESt, interviews were conducted in all innovation regions, particularly in the context of the Stakeholder Analysis and the Governance System Assessment to explore different aspects of the developed innovations. It should be noted that one example where interviews were applied in a very special format is the Italian innovation region, using ‘on the job’ interviews during the daily work routines od the interviewees, reducing the time load and effort for the stakeholders to take part in the interviews.

Interviews allow the collection of data on a wide range of different aspects of the innovation prototypes such as the emergence and development of the current innovations over time, recognize the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks associated with the innovations from the viewpoint of different stakeholder groups and define how the current innovations could be further refined through strategies for upgrading and/or upscaling in the same or another innovation region.

The cross-innovation region and work package Skype meetings allow regular exchange of knowledge and experience between all involved innovation teams in InnoForESt. This is done by establishing a regular communication routine, in a space for informal dialogue between all the teams, ensuring that the information about the activities currently taking place in the individual innovation regions and work packages can be communicated with maximum transparency besides keeping everyone on board about the progress of the project.

The development of the Skype meetings always happens in a similar way. Firstly, a date is fixed using a Doodle to find a suitable time for everyone. Then, an agenda is sent in advance to all participants with the option to comment on it. The meetings are facilitated and moderated by the WP4 team, also setting up and initiating the Skype call. Afterwards, the meetings are followed-up with minutes distributed to all participants with the opportunity to make additions and corrections. The meetings are usually scheduled for a one-hour time slot but can be increased up to one and a half or two hours if needed.

The results of each cross-innovation region and work package Skype meeting can be measured in the gain in knowledge of each participating team member on ongoing activities in all innovation regions supported by the activities in the individual work packages. Through a regular exchange, the innovation teams can get inspiration for their innovation development from the other innovation regions and have a better understanding of what kind of support they can receive from the work packages dedicated to help them in their efforts.

The feedback sheets are used to document the inner work of the innovation process. It also sheds light on the sharing of responsibilities and the quality of the collaboration between the science and practice partners in InnoForESt, since documentation of activities also includes the specification of which actors were part of which activities.

The purposes of the feedback sheets are to keep a full record of all activities and events conducted in connection with the innovation process in the innovation regions and document specific agreements made in conjunction with these activities and events. Besides, they aim to stimulate the innovation teams to constantly reflect on their activities and employed methods and document what worked out and what did not. In this way, reflexivity could be implemented as a routine within the teams.

The feedback sheets provides information about: an event/activity in general (date and time, location, etc.), an overview of the involved actors, a short summary of the activity/event, record of the agreements or planned follow-up activities and a reflection on how the event contributed to the innovation development process.

The information provided in the feedback sheets will form the basis for a systematic cross-comparison of the innovation regions, giving the chance to analyze the development pathways of the innovation processes over time and compare the similarities and differences. In addition, the feedback sheets can be used to analyze the quality of the cooperation between the science and practice partners in InnoForESt.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a class of computational models that simulate a complex system as a collection of agents interacting with each other and the environment according to some user-defined rules. It is not a mathematical modeling technique although mathematical equations can be used to simulate decision-making of agents (e.g. probability of choosing one path or another or one transport mode or another). Most actions in ABM are driven by conditional statements (i.e. ‘if’-statements).

This method follows a modeling cycle that is a recursive process, which goes from the formulation of a question and development of a hypothesis, to the implementation of the model and its analysis and starts over again, giving us the chance to simulate systems that are too complex for mathematical modeling.

A key element of ABM is the concept of emergence, namely the system dynamics arising from the interactions of multiple agents. For example, the residential patterns we observe in cities do not simply depend on pure household preferences, but rather on the complex dynamic interactions that are induced by those preferences.

In InnoForESt, this method can show the effects of individual decisions on the overall system and describe the consequences of a policy over time and across space, also highlighting which elements of a policy are likely to generate stronger or weaker impacts. Besides, ABM can identify factors that may have a stronger impact on the success of an innovation, e.g. impact of harvest rate on sustainable forest management or the impact of farmers decisions and interactions on the extent of the forest over time

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method which focuses on understanding of the relations between different causes and their interconnections. It combines certain features of qualitative research with features of quantitative research, aiming to find a better understanding of complex causal relationships among a larger number of cases

This method uses Boolean logic (Yes/No, True/Untrue) or Fuzzy algebra (degrees of membership to Yes/No or True/Untrue within a range between 0 and 1) to analyze intermediate sample sizes (between 5 to 100) that are too small for statistical analysis and a systematic cross-comparison while keeping a relation to the single case. Putting all data into a truth table can make it easier to explore similarities, clusters, patterns, and differences among cases. QCA can show sufficient and/or necessary conditions (often combinations of different variables) for a certain outcome.

As an example, QCA can show combinations of certain design rules for agri-environmental measures (AEM) which are sufficient for the measure’s success in terms of environmental effectiveness. Within the exemplary study it has been determined that (i) the targeting of one environmental goal; (ii) application to a certain area/ habitat; and (iii) an accessible advisory system, combined with (iv) either the possibility for flexible application or the obligatory participation of the nature protection agency in implementation may lead to AEM’s environmental effectiveness.

In InnoForESt, this method can find sufficient conditions for the implementation of governance innovations as well as necessary conditions for certain forest governance systems.

Process Net-Maps are a research tool for an interview-based approach, which focus on the mapping of the consecutive steps, understanding the history of an innovation process in particular about the actors involved and the sequence of events that were organized regarding the initiation, the planning and design, and the actual practical implementation of the innovation.

The interviews for this method are focused on a backward-looking and forward-looking analysis. The first part, aims to understand the development process of the innovation up to the present day, answering questions related to the history of the innovation, the motivation of each actor to get involved, the events that were positive/negative and how to overcome challenges. The second part look for to outline possible future developments of the innovation for prototyping, asking about the upcoming planed steps and criteria to measure success and failure.

The Process Net-Maps have two types of results: first, the actual physical Process Net-Maps (quantitative information) visualizing all important actors and events from the backward and forward-looking analysis. Second, the audio-recording of the interview (qualitative information).

In the InnoForESt context, they are used to learn about the motivations of the different actors to get involved into the innovation process, their influence and power in the interaction with each other, and the benefits they get from their involvement. In addition, this tool is helpful to outline possible future developments of the innovation and explore diverse options of prototyping and think about best /worst case scenarios, in order to expect possible obstacles and plan how to deal with them in advance.

The governance situation assessment (GSA) is a descriptive tool, specifically developed for InnoForESt, which provides a way of gaining a general overview of the development of an innovation by tracing the configurations of actors, institutional arrangements, policy instruments, policies, and politics taking place in a certain innovation context.

It supports the stakeholder network, as well as sets-up and carry out workshops testing viable alternatives for innovating the governance of a forest ecosystem service, giving the chance to create a prototype that can be developed by considering a realistic picture of the political/institutional conditions, under which the innovation may be possible.

The results of this method take different forms depending on the level of data processing efforts one is willing to invest. The basic results are textual answers to a list of questions related to the key problems actors perceive, mapping the societal context of a (planned) innovation. The questions deal with actors, governance perspectives, history of the innovation, the current state of the innovation and the expected future developments for the innovation. However, the results have descriptive value in themselves, as well as to constituting an exhaustive qualitative database for further, more advanced types of analysis.

The GSA creates constructive circumstances which foster a free flow of ideas and an open discussion of possible futures, surrounded by a process of suggesting out-of-the-ordinary possibilities and stimulating out-of-the-box, creative thinking, based on the innovation context.

The method constructive innovation assessment (CINA), in InnoForESt, is used to bring a variety of stakeholders together and facilitate their exploration of innovations for the governance of forest ecosystem services that they find relevant.

CINA aims to offer the participants new insights and networking opportunities with people they would normally not talk to. It provides a workshop-based learning forum for all participants at an early stage of a development, focusing on the progress of alternative scenarios for different governance innovations. Through constructive dialogues, the concerned actors take into account several considerations that can affect the development of the emerging process.

To carry out the workshop, the innovation regions plan a scenario development describing the case and including a list of relevant stakeholders. It is crucial to do a prototype assessment in order to understand which specific prototypes could be successful or could lead to rather less-desired consequences. The next step is a training for the innovation teams, where the goal is to get a basic understanding of the method and comparability of the results. The workshop is implemented as structured interactions focusing on forest ecosystem services innovation scenarios. It needs to be absolutely clear about stakeholder’s views and highly sensitive to their interests.

This method reveals the underlying argumentations and potential conflicts of a scenario, opening a path to constructive intervention and a follow-up to the innovation. However, it requires enough level of time investment for scenario development and training to be successful and useful.

Role board games (RBG) can be used as tools to deal with the complexity of human behavior related to decision-making processes, besides they can be repeated under controlled conditions, increasing the validity of experiments in real-life situations.

In order to answer the question: How to create conditions to enable innovations for sustainable use and well-being in innovation regions under the diverging interests of forest ecosystem services users? an RBG was designed as a behavioral experiment adapting to the context of InnoForESt, enabling stakeholders from the innovation regions to test different prototyping strategies for sustainable forest ecosystem services provision, considering different policy interventions, such as strict regulation vs. various types of payments for ecosystem services schemes, business incentives and external risk factors, such as climate events, depopulation, migration, and market risks.

The RBG sessions take place with a group of five forest ecosystem services users representing different actor groups, who make mutual decisions about the use and management of a forest ecosystem and the related forest ecosystem services provision. One of the actors, will be an ‘external actor’ representing an authority external to forest use but with regulatory, sanctioning, and monitoring power. During each session, the players are confronted with fostering or hindering context conditions as well as different actors’ values and interests.

This method can be used as a learning tool for the involved players which allows for studying the effects of particular interventions on the decision-making and behavior of the different actors represented.

The task of mapping and assessing forest ecosystem services and institutional frameworks (Work Package 2), was addressed with a questionnaire which was designed to have mainly multiple-choice questions, producing quantitative comparable data across regions, but also open questions for more detailed qualitative answers.

The development of the questionnaire began with an initial literature scan on existing comparisons of forests and forest ecosystem services relevant policy documents and forest management systems. This step gave the basics of how to conduct the analysis and showed an understanding of the types of documents that could be used.

The questionnaire was designed to have mainly multiple-choice questions producing quantitative comparable data across regions, but also open to questions for more detailed qualitative answers.

The person in charge to fill the questionnaire was trained on how to understand the document being analyzed. A manual was created as a support for the step-by-step document analysis, including some clarifications to key terms as well as examples on most questions and responses

All the information from the questionnaires was gathered in a database in Excel format. This information could be used to create spatial maps that also could be overlaid with the additional spatial information from biophysical mapping.

Once the database is usable online, the InnoForESt team members should be able to search for different factor combinations to see what types of innovations exist in the presence of specific factors or combinations, also regarding the biophysical conditions.

The Waldaktie-innovation, promotes tourist awareness about the CO2 emissions released during their holidays by giving them the option to buy “forest shares“(Waldaktien). A certified payment of 10 € supports the plantation and maintenance of a tree in a „climate forest“, located in different parts of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where only locally adapted trees species are used.

The buyers can plant the trees by themselves, which creates a link to the project and will motivate the tourist to return in the forthcoming season to see how the climate forest has grown during their absence. In addition, companies can buy Waldaktien and use them as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) and for marketing purposes, making their products more attractive.

Currently, the afforestation is financed by the sale of Waldaktien and is carried out according to the state forest law, resulting in 18 climate forests, covering an area of 120 ha. The ecosystem services provided by these forests are climate services, biodiversity and water quality, enhancing climate protection and benefiting the local people.

In the coming years, Waldaktie looks forward to developing strategies together with Innoforest in order to build different approaches to quantify and give an economic value to further ecosystem services. With this, the innovation “Waldaktie 2.0” could be a reality, taking into account more ecosystem services besides carbon sequestration.

The region of Eisenwurzen in Austria is a forest rich site, which had the need of new products and ideas that could boost the value-added of the regional wood. Through addressing new markets with attractive concepts such as high qualified labor and value creation, arose the innovation of developing crafted multipurpose furniture made of wood from certified origin.

This innovation is looking for a more sustainable forest management, allowing selective timber extraction from old growth forest, replantation of adequate species and actively support the high value wood processing chain. These forest management strategies also contribute to nature conservation, sustainability, and regional heritage.

At the moment, an increased collaboration of stakeholders from forestry, public administration, regional planning, tourism, and traditional craftsmanship can create value, support local jobs and generate more employment which means more income for the people in the region. However, it is necessary to start financial and other support programs to further develop the innovation in the rural areas and promote the connections with urban customers.

In the upcoming years, more chances of business links within the different stakeholders should be developed. The role of Innoforest regarding this innovation is to bring new ideas from projects in different countries, giving the chance to improve their forest management giving as an outcome an upgrade in the wood processing chain.

This innovation takes place in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Both of countries look for collective actions of self-organized activities, that can tackle societal and environmental challenges. The implementation of innovative practices in forest management, supports the evolution of nature-based forestry.

The Czech land Trust Association Cmelak, in Liberec Region, created a self-organized common pool regime by certificates of patronage. The buyers of these certificates purchase certain m2 of “New Virgin Forest”, which means that old spruce monoculture forest is replaced by a close to nature forest.

The Slovak Forest Commons are in the Nízke Tatry National Park. This area was heavily affected by storms in the past due to its forest composition, which lead to a shift in the forest management practices to approaches closer to carbon smart forestry plans and in this way, increase the forest resilience. Innoforest is currently under the development of suitable payment schemes, bringing in international knowledge regarding voluntary payment schemes.

Members of the local forest and a wide range of the society, benefits from this innovation due to the ecosystem services provided by a biodiverse forest, especially the ones related to regulation and culture. In the future, this innovation looks forward to have a broader scope and increase the number of donors, regular donations and new payment incentives such as new market products.

Habitat Bank is an innovation for biodiversity conservation that was born as an attempt to control biodiversity degradation, looking forward to work with the restoration potential present in Finland, which can work as offsets on sites where nature values can be improved.

This innovation works by shifting the payment responsibility to the actors who generate biodiversity degradation, benefiting several stakeholders. Companies degrading biodiversity can compensate the loss and gain responsible reputation. Landowners, who offer sites for restoration, get a new source of income leaving aside logging. Besides, intermediaries supporting site assessment can gain business opportunities, local people can get new recreational areas and the forest biodiversity improves, supporting the provision for other ecosystem services.

The Finnish commercial forest management faces pressure on biodiversity due to the even-age management practices, which gives as result a uniform forest structure without heterogeneity. The restoration activities would change these characteristics with strategies aiming to restore the forest naturalness.

This payment scheme works specifically for activities that generate measurable degradation such as road construction, mining, peat mining or drainage. To maximize conservation benefits and connectivity, the sites used as offsets should be located close to existing reserves.

The future aim of Habitat Bank is to have functioning habitat markets that support biodiversity conservation and restoration targets. Additionally, target the private sector activities to avoid, mitigate and compensate their degrading activities, and shift the costs of conservation to their value chains.

The Forest Pasture System Management in the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy is an active forest management innovation, developed by a close to nature silvicultural management where the forest can offer multiple functions (economic, environmental, biodiversity conservation, hazard protection) and at the same time, focus on the preservation of the traditional mountain environment in this area: the wooded pastures and the activities related to it.

The key elements are investments and improvement of the ecosystem through prolonged and continuous planning. This ensures a long-term perspective for the design of interventions, and local stakeholder involvement in the decision-making and forest management, targeting high fertility and large cover. Increasing the economic value of the forest, while preserving its ecological value.

With the preservation of the mountain environment and the reinforcement of the multiple forest functions, forest owners, local people, tourist operators, operators of local services (craftsmanship, transportation…) and hunters can increase their revenues while attracting more economic possibilities. At the same time, the creation of a platform that allows an effective communication strategy among managers, local people and stakeholders, will reduce the tensions and conflicts within them, improving a common willingness to cooperate by finding shared goals, preferences, interests and goods, having as an outcome a balanced management that prevents both abandonment and excessive use of the forest.

Swedish forest sector must cope with the current change in demand for the forest product, going from the existing timber industry to forests focused on carbon sequestration. With this context, the “Love Forest” project was born to bring together stakeholders from the forestry sector with the new generation, elementary school students, aiming an exchange of impressions about forestry.

“Love Forest” is a competition in which the school children plan a project, based on new and innovative forest resources uses ideas, giving them the chance to express their visions and thought about the Swedish Forests. Besides, this approach allows them to show how they see forest resource use in the future.

The students have the chance to visit the Universeum Science Centre in Gothenburg, as well as to meet with different innovation partners that will help them to deepen their forest knowledge, increasing their motivation to go to school to share what they learned. Afterwards, the students can show their ideas to the different representatives from industry, academia and the public.

This contest also represents an exciting new working method for teachers, providing professional development through a training about Swedish forest and ecology provided by the Universeum educators.

This innovation has been successful bringing together industry and academia with the public, showing the importance of the forest for a more sustainable vision of society’s resource use. In the future, this innovation can be applied in more European countries.