Increasing small business resilience to flood risk: co-production in the development of a prototype e-learning tool to promote small business adaptation to flood risk

Flooding of communities is becoming a repeated, widespread issue within the UK, and elsewhere. Small businesses are a crucial part of the UK economy; the UK Summer 2007 flood resulted in flooding of 7,000 businesses and monetary loss to local economies. There has, however, been limited research on how small businesses learn to adapt to increase their resilience. This paper shares interdisciplinary research that has developed an innovative coproduction process to engage small businesses and the stakeholders that support them in resilience building, in partnership working to develop a prototype e-learning tool to promote longer-term adaptation to flooding amongst small businesses. The research focus here is on both the processes of the co-production and their influence on the outcome - the prototype e-learning tool. The co-production processes combined workshops, virtual engagement and co-creation of learning resources that captured business knowledge and learning on flood adaptation. Data were captured through: independent observation, audio/visual recording, transcription of discussions, and the participatory production of graphic outputs. Our approach reflects current ethics and practices of stakeholder participation within research so that other equally valid forms of knowledge are recognised and drawn on. The e-learning tool is designed as a living resource to support development of a community of learning practice among small businesses to increase resilience to increased flood risk.