ABSTRACT. Context. - Despite a wealth of analytical knowledge on factors and processes that operate to slow down or impede sustainability transitions in various sectors of society, design-oriented researchers face a lack of guidance on the ?how to? question for developing knowledge to support sustainability changes. From 2007, we crafted co-innovation as an approach for governance and management of change-oriented projects, combining three domains; a complex adaptive systems perspective, a social learning setting, and dynamic monitoring and evaluation. Objective. - This paper sets out to describe the co-innovation approach and draw lessons from its application in projects on ecological intensification in Uruguay and the European Union. © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)