PhD position in Engaging Tourists in Island Innovation (1.0 FTE)

The project FREIIA - Facilitating Resilience Embracing Islands Innovation Approaches - is an Interreg North Sea project, in which governments and researchers from 6 countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and France) cooperate on improving the speed and impact of innovation through designing smart governance processes. We work with 5 case study islands in all countries (except Germany) as our experiment spaces. In the project North Sea islands act as special places for “spark type innovations" that offer great potential for the mainland. The project uses a bottom-up participatory approach in which community involvement is central and young entrepreneurs, students and tourists enrich the process.

Within the FREIIA project the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the UG is lead partner for the work package: Engaging Tourists in Island Innovation. In this work package the PhD student performs a series of experiments that engage tourists in island innovation using online connectivity as the main workhorse. In the research three types of tourist engagement are tested:

1. Can tourists share ideas and be creative co-creators in the island innovations?
2. Are tourists willing to support island innovation in physical terms, via helping, or testing products?
3. Are tourists willing to give donations for innovations on islands? For this work we will use the Greenmapper platform (https://www.greenmapper.org ) and will in cooperation with software developers build relevant software to support the experiments.

The PhD candidate will be supervised by Dr Frans J. Sijtsma and Prof. Dimitris Ballas.

The result of the three year PhD research is a PhD thesis with 3 or 4 international scientific publications and several reports for partners and stakeholders in the project. The PhD candidate will also be involved in the community of Research Master students following the Erasmus Mundus Islands and Sustainability track and may seek cooperation with the partners of that track in Iceland, Lesbos and Gran Canaria. The PhD work will furthermore contribute to the research theme ‘Islands: laboratories for landscape stewardship?’ of the Sustainable Landscapes research group.

The PhD candidate is responsible for:

• designing and performing the research in the above mentioned project, resulting in a PhD thesis that is defended publicly
• publishing and presenting research results
• keeping and developing relations with internal and external partners to strengthen the network of Islands and Sustainability researchers.

Giving a few guest lectures to students of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences or other programmes of UG.