The paper discusses the results of a qualitative empirical study, in the context of the already completed pilot project 'Towards the regional nutrition cycle: Greening the University Canteen by regional Innovation Labs'.  The project was funded by the German National Sustainability Council (RNE) (Weber & Heidelmann 2019: 419) from 2018-2019 and conducted at the Philipps-University Marburg by Prof Dr Susanne Maria Weber and her project team. Following the idea of 'real laboratories' (Schneidewind & Singer Brodowski 2013: 122) as a format in which science becomes a 'knowledge broker between systems' and 'network node in differentiated modern societies', the program used three future and innovation laboratories to support the development and establishment of a regional economic cycle. The innovation labs pursue the idea not only of "bringing the whole system into one space" (Weisbord and Janoff  2001), but of collective strategy development (Weber 2018). It thus enables the search for desirable futures and the networking for different actors with equal rights across "institutional boundaries" (Weber 2014: 37). The innovation labs are organizational spaces for collective learning , in that sense that organizational stakeholders learn to develop sustainable solutions for the region and become multipliers of this knowledge. 

Intending discourse innovation, the program addresses regional stakeholders in order to bring forth regional food cycles and thereby address the UNs SDGs (UN 2015). By innovation labs three layers of transformation were addressed and regional professionals’ learning supported by organizational education students (Weber & Heidelmann 2019: 417). In a longitudinal approach (Brake 2018) image-based qualitative interviews, the participating regional practitioners were asked how they imagine the university. The discourse-oriented metaphorical analysis shows stakeholders´ different imaginations of the university. The University is imagined as a "Bridge", a "door opener" or a "powerful engine".  As will be shown, those mental models relate to discursive positionings of the university, too.

Contrasting findings from the first cycle of the research process will be presented. The longitudinal and qualitative image-based research design triangulated image and text based imaginations of regional stakeholders, who participate in the one year long collective process of three regional innovation laboratories. Regional stakeholders were interviewed (in total four times) before and after the three innovation labs. Before the interviews, stakeholders´ chose presented images out of an image set (70 images), guided by impulse questions, to which they selected spontaneously images they connected most to in order to refer to the question posed. In a narrative approach they told about their associations and ‘made sense’ of the images chosen. The images do not only have 'elicitive power' (Harper, 2002). They do not only refer to the individual meaning and sense making, but refer to a collective discursive dimension, too (Weber & Heidelmann 2021, forthcoming). Based on a discourse-oriented metaphor-analysis (Karl 2017), these biographical narrations reveal the potential of discourse relations, too. Individual perspectives can then show as interlinked to ‘historical-cultural, power/knowledge shaped modes of symbolization.’ Metaphorical concepts structuring narratives will be analyzed as not only individual, but collective historical-cultural and institutional imaginary positionings of the university in relation to the region.

The article discusses empirical findings from an organizational pedagogical perspective. Linking image-based interviews to a discourse-analytical perspective, stakeholders’ imaginations of the university relate to different discursive positionings of the university like the Humboldtian, the critical or the mass university (Walter 2014), the 'entrepreneurial university' or the 'ecological university' (Barnett 2011: 145). Regional professionals´ imaginations of the university are shown to relate to the discursive positionings of the university (Weber 2013) and the relational positionings of university and region. In this sense, regional practitioners' positioning can also be connected to the 'discursive' practice' (Foucault 1981: 74) of positionings of the university in society.

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