Companies and professionals competence and skills development are the heart of the ResPa project’s approach to finding new ways to support responsible packaging. As the demands of circularity grow, so does the need for professionals, organisations, policymakers, and citizens who perceive packaging not only as a material or logistical issue, but as a complex behavioural and systemic challenge. Achieving this shared understanding calls for new learning tools that enable actors across the packaging value chain to communicate, collaborate, and innovate together.
To address this need, ResPa engages partners from all four sectors of the ‘Quadruple Helix’ configurations (Caryannis & Campbell, 2009), inviting educators, businesses, citizens, and public authorities to co-create new training content. This collaborative approach helps us to identify and tackle the behavioural, systemic, and skills-based gaps that currently slow progress towards more responsible packaging practices. Through QH approach individuals and citizens can be perceived as something beyond the recipients placed at the end of the packaging lifecycle (Vidal-Ayuso, Akhmedova & Jaca, 2023); active contributors towards responsible packaging solutions, who shape the feasibility and success of sustainable packaging systems through their behaviours, expectations, and everyday decisions.
By designing training in partnership with stakeholders who encounter the realities of packaging every day, the ResPa project’s partners aim to generate new micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability that are relevant, practice-oriented, and grounded in diverse perspectives of the packaging value-chain. This approach enables us to bring together the voices of designers, manufacturers, consumers, waste operators, regulators, and community organisations, which ensures that the new training content will reflect real-world needs rather than idealised models.
As the project moves forward, we remain committed not only to improving packaging systems but to reshaping how innovation is done. We seek to move from isolated problem-solving to deeply collaborative, inclusive, and participatory approaches through ResPa partners’ Living Labs to strengthen circular thinking across the entire value-chain. Through shared learning, we aim to build a cultural shift in packaging solutions used – viewing innovation as something developed with society, not simply for it. Together, we are working towards a future in which responsible packaging is a shared cultural practice supported by the skills, competences, and collaboration needed to make circularity a reality for new generations.
References
Carayannis, E. G., & Campbell, D. F. J. (2009). ‘Mode 3’ and ‘Quadruple Helix’: Toward a 21st‑century fractal innovation ecosystem. International Journal of Technology Management, 46(3–4), 201–234.
Lah, O. (2025). Breaking the silos: Integrated approaches to foster sustainable development and climate action. Sustainable Earth Reviews, 8(1).
Vidal-Ayuso, F., Akhmedova, A., & Jaca, C. (2023). The circular economy and consumer behaviour: Literature review and research directions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 418, Article 137824. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.137824
Written by:
Dr Maria Salomaa, Principal Lecturer, Innovation management
