Supporting Entrepreneurial Discovery through Stakeholder Participation: Lesson learnt from 10 Regional Development Teams in the Danish - German Border Region

By date the discussion on stakeholder participation in regional development projects is focussing on phenomena like involvement and/or institutional aspects. Even if some attention has already been drawn towards capabilities in collaboration and conflict resolution for putting stakeholder participation into action, the integration of team work quality as vital determinant of stakeholder participation and project performance is underexplored so far. This paper contributes with the development of a stakeholder performance model. Empirically this paper bases on ten cases of teams. Quantitative as well as qualitative data was conducted. First empirical findings based on the quantitative survey indicate a high impact of team work quality on stakeholder participation and on team performance. In cases where just a low levels of stakeholder participation were observed team members felt regardless being committed. It seems that the team members do not estimate their participation as being important or essential. Allocating roles and tasks is vital and should be accompanied by a dialog which really makes the stakeholder participating in developing the institutional setting of the project team. In the qualitative data teams which used a bottom up structure got to better relationships but by the same time also higher levels of performance, whereas teams which used mainly top down structures gut fragmented and delivered a less innovative output. This is work under progress. Final findings will be presented at the conference.