There is general consensus across Europe that not enough knowledge generated in the research sphere translates into changes in agricultural practices and, conversely, that innovations generated in collaboration with multiple stakeholders have a far greater chance of producing appropriate and widely used solutions. Against this background, the European Commission launched European Innovation Partnerships, and ENDURE is seeking to build on this momentum with a co-innovation seminar and workshop focused on crop protection within sustainable agriculture.
ENDURE believes a purposefully collaborative innovation effort drawing from different economic sectors, areas of expertise and practice, and involving multiple stakeholders ensures the problems identified are pertinent to the farming community and that the solutions are appropriate. In addition, the involvement of the intended users of the knowledge, tools and methods to be developed ensures buy-in from the latter, both in the innovation process and right through to the stage were it is used and further adapted.
This is particularly important in ensuring a shift towards more sustainable agricultural practices, particularly those pertaining to crop protection, as the solutions are not recipes applicable to a range of situations but demand the local application of knowledge in ways that are adapted to the local physical, social, economic and cultural circumstances.
To this end, ENDURE partners INRA and ACTA (France), Wageningen UR (Netherlands) and Knowledge Centre for Agriculture (Denmark), in collaboration with MTT (Finland), are organising a seminar in October this year to be followed by a workshop in November. The main goal of the seminar is to establish a resource pool to support the development of co-innovative approaches. It's more immediate goals are to strengthen the theoretical background and produce a state of the art review on co-innovation theory and practice and help identify resources for the subsequent steps of the initiative.
The overall goal of the workshop is to launch a learning community, bringing together practitioners (innovation managers and boundary network participants, in other words those working in the sphere connecting research to practice), researchers and others concerned with co-innovation.
The workshop will demonstrate the potential of this initiative to respond to a genuine need among the farm advisory community. The workshop's more immediate goals are to facilitate sharing and enriching of concepts and experiences among participants and to identify useful concepts, case studies and promising approaches across Europe for future co-innovation partnerships.
- Participation at these events is limited, nevertheless if you are interested, please contact ENDURE.
- For more information on the European Innovation Partnership 'Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability', click here.
Topics
Species
