Living Labs
Accelerators of an open innovation process
Living Labs emerged as a tool to bridge the existing gap between innovative solutions and end-users’ real needs. To do so, Living Labs opened themselves up to real-life environments to co-create with end users valuable innovations that would fit their needs.
AgroServ Living Labs are the core of the collaboration between the academic community and the stakeholders acting as accelerators of the innovation process. They have been conceived as open and collaborative ways to translate research results into technological, organizational, institutional, and societal innovations, and, on the other hand, to facilitate the generation of new scientific questions which will be further researched with the support of AgroServ’s services.
AgroServ Living Lab’s ambition is to cover functionally, ecologically, geographically, and climatically multidimensional challenges of agroecological transition integrating economic, social, and political aspects.
To achieve this, we established three Living Labs and co-creation hubs in different geographic areas, supported by different installations of AgroServ’s Research Infrastructures. We designed our living-labs as co-creation open support ecosystems to address the challenges of innovation in the agroecology transition, with expected outcomes in the knowledge, business, and social domains.
The three Living Lab are heterogeneous since they represent different specificities.
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This Living Lab will propose the solutions needed for the preservation of natural resources to cope with main threats in the Mediterranean region (climate change, drought, biodiversity loss, invasive species, decline in soil quality) while ensuring sustainability and resilience of agrifood systems.
The second Living Lab focuses on the sustainability of agrifood production systems, with an integrated food chain approach covering from primary production to food processing and preparation. This Central Europe living lab involves a comprehensive platform integrating experimental fields and greenhouses and stables hosting different types of livestock and a Food Processing Training Center (FoodTech Pavilion) with six main operation parts – processing of meat, milk, cereals, fruits, and vegetables, beer and oilseeds and medicinal plants. The lab is open to multiple actors, with the aim of achieving innovative solutions with the active participation of all stakeholders and the valuable involvement of end-users in each step of the process.
The third Living Lab focuses on grass-based dairy and beef production in Nordic conditions including both mineral and organic soils.
This content was drafted by Claudia Zoani, Coordinator of the Research Infrastructure METROFOOD-RI (metrofood.eu). In AgroServ she leads Work Package 6 - Open Innovation Hub.