An interview with Sofia Iosifidou, Researcher and Innovation Project Manager at Future Needs
EU-funded innovation is ultimately developed for people – whether they are citizens, businesses, practitioners, policymakers or other stakeholders. Understanding their needs, experiences and perspectives is an important part of the research process.
There are different ways to do this, and co-creation workshops are one of them. They can help research teams test assumptions, validate findings and bring stakeholder knowledge into project decisions.
In Meet the Minds Behind the Impact, Future Needs experts share lessons from their work in European research and innovation projects, while introducing the people behind the work.
This time, we speak with Sofia Iosifidou about when co-creation can add value, what makes a workshop meaningful, and what proposal teams should consider when planning stakeholder engagement and participatory research.
I’m Sofia, a Researcher and Innovation Project Manager at Future Needs, working mainly on socioeconomic research and impact assessment. My background is actually in engineering. I first studied Chemical and Process Engineering in Thessaloniki and later moved to the Netherlands, where I completed an Engineering Doctorate in Process and Product Design. During that time, I became involved in an EU project focused on sustainable environmental solutions. That experience made me realise how much I enjoyed working at the intersection of research, innovation and societal challenges, and motivated me to continue in this direction.
Because researchers can make assumptions about what people need, but those assumptions need to be tested with the people themselves. Depending on the project, co-creation might mean citizens helping shape a new service, SMEs identifying barriers to adopting a technology, practitioners validating a tool or industry representatives challenging assumptions about a market. We shouldn’t involve stakeholders simply because engagement is written into the project plan. Their knowledge and experience should help us understand the problem better and influence what the project does next.
Engineering taught me to understand systems, question assumptions and look for evidence. Human-centred research adds the perspectives of people, organisations and the wider context in which an innovation needs to work. I find that combination very useful.
Before bringing people into a room, we should know what we want to learn, why these particular participants need to be involved and which parts of the project are still open to change. The way the workshop is designed and facilitated also matters. Different participants have different experiences and ways of contributing, so you need to create an environment where those perspectives can genuinely come through. And then there is what happens afterwards. We need to analyse what we heard, translate it into useful findings and show how those findings feed back into the project. Without that connection, co-creation can easily become a box-ticking exercise.
It actually meant a lot to me. When I first joined Future Needs, one of the first things I was asked to do was facilitate a workshop at one of our Aviation Twin Transition Cluster events in Athens. I was still new to the team, so being trusted with that responsibility showed me very early that my colleagues believed in what I could bring. Since then, workshops have become an important part of my work. Every group is different, and good facilitation is something I continuously learn.
A proposal should explain who needs to participate and why, how they will be recruited, what the project needs to learn or validate, how different perspectives will be included, how the findings will be analysed and, importantly, what those findings will influence. A workshop isn’t an outcome. What matters is what you learn from it and what the project can do differently because of that learning.
A good example is SME-RISE, an Erasmus+ project where Future Needs is developing a learning platform to support capacity building and entrepreneurship in the drone sector. We launched our work with a preliminary workshop at Airspace World in Lisbon, bringing together 14 participants from industry and aviation policy backgrounds. Rather than asking broad questions about the drone market, we came with something concrete to validate: our initial analysis of drone services and their profit potential.
Participants helped us assess whether different services were positioned correctly, identify additional opportunities and explore the opportunities and risks young professionals may face when entering the EU drone market. Those findings help validate the project’s needs analysis, inform business modelling and market-entry strategies, shape the use cases and services addressed in the business education materials, and support how we communicate opportunities in the sector to young professionals and SMEs.
What comes to mind isn’t one particular project or output, but the way we at Future Needs approach the work. If I had to describe it in one word, I would say passion. We don’t want to do something just to check a box. We investigate, ask questions and try to understand what the other partners are working on, not only our own tasks. I think that’s particularly important with co-creation and impact research because you can’t do them in isolation.
Ideally, from the proposal stage. That’s when you can think carefully about whose perspectives the project needs, what assumptions should be tested, where stakeholder input can genuinely influence the research and which methods are best suited to collecting that evidence. It also helps make sure that co-creation is connected to the technical work rather than becoming separate activities happening alongside it.
