The VALERIE project partners have been meeting in Toulouse (23rd-27th January) to review progress and plan for the last year of the project.
Julie Ingram, Pete Gaskell, Jane Mills and Janet Dwyer all attended as part of the CCRI collaborative team working on the project with 14 partners from 6 countries across Europe. The CCRI is leading the main case study work package.
Over the past 3 years the project has been developing ask-Valerie, a digital but knowledgeable ‘assistant-expert’ or ‘virtual adviser’ for searching and retrieving research results from scientific sources. As part of this, the CCRI team has been coordinating stakeholder engagement in 10 agriculture and forestry case studies across Europe.
The project has developed a stakeholder-driven methodology grounded in co-innovation. In this the stakeholders (farmers, advisers, supply chain actors, decision maker, researchers, forest owners and technicians etc) work together with project partners to identify and try to solve innovation problems using both existing research and implementing their own. The stakeholders have also been central in developing and testing ask-Valerie.
This year ahead sees further development and testing of ask-Valerie as well as progressing the virtual community facility of the tool so that learning can be optimised through both searching for research results and by exchanging experiences with other users. Intensive work continues in the case studies to evaluate and share trial outcomes and help to build ask-Valerie
VALERIE’ (VALorising European Research for Innovation in agriculturE and forestry) is a four-year EU FP7 project which concerns research to underpin innovation in the agri-rural sector.
For more details see www.valerie.eu
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