CCRI researchers Julie Ingram, Jane Mills and Peter Gaskell attended the final Symposium for the VALERIE project in Brussels on 14th November. This EU FP7 funded project has been running for four years and focuses on improving the flow of information between farmers, advisers and researchers to help drive innovation.
Its key achievements include:
- Building a ‘virtual adviser’ tool (ask-Valerie.eu) to enable access to knowledge for innovation; and to support communication among practitioners and advisers
- Consulting stakeholders (farmers, foresters, advisers and supply chain partners) in ten case studies to identify knowledge gaps, assess technical and economic viability of innovative solutions and to reveal barriers to uptake
- Converting research outcomes with innovation potential into formats accessible for end users (farmers, advisers, and enterprises in the supply chain)
Partners from across Europe attended the symposium, including organisations from the Netherlands, Spain, Finland, France, Germany and Italy.
The aim of this final symposium was to:
- Demonstrate the ‘ask-Valerie’ tool
- Discuss the VALERIE project approach and outcomes in the context of European Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS)
- Discuss future issues associated with access to knowledge for innovation
Julie presented ‘Case studies for stakeholder-driven innovation’ providing background to the stakeholder –drive methodology developed and applied in the 10 case studies participating in VALERIE.
Ask-Valerie.eu will be a novel search platform that helps practitioners and advisers in the field of agriculture and forestry to find and share documents that respond to their specific queries. It will be launched in December 2017.
