Faced with strong environmental issues, the agricultural sector has to revise deeply its aims and performance criteria. Numerous methods have been proposed to involve heterogeneous stakeholders in farming system design, and several authors highlight the importance of reflexivity in such projects. Our paper aims at strengthening this reflexivity by proposing a comparative analysis framework contributing to the assessment of participative design methods for rural innovation with regard to explorative innovation. We used a framework proposed by Charue- Duboc et al. (2010) as an entry point to build an analytical grid enriched by the empirical analysis of three different participatory design methods in order to make it operational. The new framework we propose makes it possible to assess the capacity of these methods to foster exploratory innovation and enhance reflexivity regarding farming system innovation.