EUREKA is one of a growing ‘family’ of EU-funded projects that aim to strengthen and improve the flow of agricultural and rural-related knowledge and innovation at European, national and regional level. Effective knowledge transfer is increasingly important for enabling and accelerating the necessary transition towards a more fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly European food system as promoted by the ‘From Farm to Fork’ strategy of the European Commission (a cornerstone of the ‘European Green Deal’).
According to the EUREKA Project Co-ordinator, Professor Pieter Spanoghe from the University of Ghent:
“In the coming years farmers and other rural businesses will need to be much better connected with a wide variety of trusted sources of practice-orientated information and innovations to help them overcome their day-to-day challenges and uncover new market opportunities. Our EUREKA project is developing and piloting the ‘FarmBook’ – a single open source e-platform for collecting and sharing the many different types of end-user material currently produced by Horizon 2020 multi-actor projects”.
The EUREKA project brings together a diverse partnership of experts from 21 organisations in 15 countries to analyse the supply of – and demand for – the practical knowledge and innovative solutions generated in the 120 multi-actor projects that have been funded to-date under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. EUREKA builds upon the EURAKNOS project which has already been working for 2 year months to co-design the blueprint for a data system that can make the knowledge and best practices in H2020 Thematic Networks more accessible and useable for agricultural, forestry and other rural businesses.
An important process when building the FarmBook open knowledge platform is to understand who the potential users are, what are their requirements for accessing knowledge and how they would normally look for new ideas and information within their own sector. As Professor Pieter Spanoghe further explains:
“To understand what the FarmBook platform should look like from the user perspective, we have applied methods that are commonly used in consumer product development to build user personas and user journeys. In the coming months we will be validating these personas before preparing to launch the first version of the ‘FarmBook’ in March / April 2021”.
Excited by this ambitious step towards the “knowledge intensive” future of European farming and forestry? Then stay in touch and help to test and optimise the ‘FarmBook’. Training will be available. Follow EUREKA on Twitter: @H2020EUREKA
Mark Redman
EUREKA communication & dissemination team
