The Promise and the Paradox of Innovation: Understanding Stagnation in the Living Lab Enrekang, Indonesia

The living lab Enrekang, established in 2019 in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was created to strengthen rural communication and support collaborative innovation across agriculture, livestock, environment, and extension services. Its flagship initiative, the Digital Farmer Field School (DFFS), was co-designed as a digital tool to improve farmers’ access to practical and locally adapted information. The early phase of collaboration generated strong momentum, culminating in a functional prototype tested with farmer groups by 2022. However, progress slowed soon after, revealing a gap between the initiative’s early promise and its subsequent stagnation. This qualitative case study, conducted between December 2024 and June 2025, draws on document reviews, focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and participant observations to analyze how the slowdown emerged and how it altered communication, coordination, and relational expectations among participating actors. Applying the governance-of-innovation lifecycle and a social capital lens, the study shows that political transitions, leadership turnover, staff rotation, and the absence of policy and budgetary anchoring disrupted coordination routines and reduced cross-sector interaction, even as motivation among farmers and frontline staff remained high. The case also highlights the novelty and complexity of the living lab approach, which introduced coordination demands and institutional unfamiliarity that local systems were not yet equipped to absorb. This study contributes to ongoing debates on collaborative innovation by illustrating the vulnerability of living labs when governance arrangements do not evolve alongside innovation milestones. Sustaining similar efforts requires formal anchoring, adaptive coordination, and mechanisms that protect collaboration across political and institutional transitions.