EIP-AGRI Seminar "Digital Innovation Hubs: mainstreaming digital agriculture"

Between 1-2 of June 2017, I had the opportunity to participate in the invitation-only EIP-AGRI Seminar titled "Digital Innovation Hubs: mainstreaming digital agriculture". The Seminar took place at the luxurious Lyrath Estate at Kilkenny, Ireland and I attended on behalf of NEUROPUBLIC.

Simply put, DIHs are structures that aim to facilitate the adoption of innovative digital tools and services by SMEs (and companies in general), allowing the faster digitization of their processes. Stakeholders of DIHs (and potential members) include technology providers, innovation brokers, farmers' organizations, business incubators, investors / funding bodies etc.

The #EIPAGRI seminar on #DigitalInnovation Hubs is about to begin & we're ready to be a part of it! pic.twitter.com/UhN3vN7MPP

— NEUROPUBLIC (@Neuropublic) June 1, 2017

The Seminar aimed at enabling a wide variety of stakeholders, including policy makers, research and technology organisations, SMEs, investors and other actors from the agricultural sector to share knowledge, expertise and needs to develop Digital Innovation Hubs for agriculture. Starting from the basics, it provided all the necessary introductory information (what is a DIH, its expected roles, potential members of DIHs etc.) and during its course, it required participants to provide their views on the envisaged barriers which could challenge the setup and operation of DIHs. On the 2nd and last day of the event, participants were asked to provide their input on potential use cases where DIH would be valuable. All these took place in the context of breakout sessions, where participants were grouped in teams working on a specific theme/topic, followed by plenary sessions where the outcomes of the groups were presented. I really liked the interactive approach of the event (btw, excellent facilitation by Vincent Tiel Groenestege!), which kept everyone involved and alarmed and discouraged us from responding to emails and checking our social media accounts :-)

We all know that the future of #farming is digital; the #EIPAGRI #DigitalInnovationHubs seminar confirms that so far pic.twitter.com/kIRghG0ORu

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) June 1, 2017

I am personally interested in the theme of the seminar, as it combines innovation and digitization in the agrifood sector, based on networking and exploitation of existing resources. I would love to find the opportunity to be more actively involved with that and have the feeling that I will get it through the Action 16 of the Greek Rural Development Programme. I strongly believe that the future of farming is digital and data production, especially at farm level, will significantly boost food production, thus contributing in addressing the global food security issue.

During the event, I had the opportunity to make some new and interesting connections. At the same time, I came across some familiar faces, including but not limited to:

• Daniel Azevedo, Senior Policy Advisor of COPA COGECA; a person I meet quite often lately;
• AIOTI WG06 members, including chair Luis Perez Freire, Phillip-Andreas Schmidt (Bayer Crop Science) and Raul Palma (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center - also a partner of our DataBio H2020 project);
• Spyros Fountas (Agricultural University of Athens); one of the few Greek researchers working with precision agriculture / smart farming (and a collaborator of NEUROPUBLIC in several occasions) - also the coordinator of the prominent SmartAKIS H2020 project.
• Peter Paree from ZLTO, an acquaintance from the CAPSELLA H2020 project (back in my Agroknow days); an open-minded person working on opening up data in the agro-biodiversity context.

Yeap, I was there!

I also had the pleasure to meet and talk with EIP-AGRI team members, such as Iman Boot, Pacôme Elouna Eyenga & Quico Onega. The whole team did an excellent work with the organization and the facilitation of the event, leaving us participants with the sole task of providing our feedback where needed.

All in all it has been an interesting and fruitful event which provided me with food for thought / homework (should I say officework?) and only left me with the dire need to attend the next one of the series - the Agri Innovation Summit (AIS 2017), which will come as a natural follow up of this event. Will I make it there in the end? ;-)

Data revolution in agriculture: Emerging new data-driven business models in the agri-food sector

The European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI)  organized a seminar titled "Data revolution: emerging new data-driven business models in the agri-food sector" between 22-23 of June 2016 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The seminar was attended by more than 100 people and NEUROPUBLIC was there, represented by its President Dr. Fotis Chatzipapadopoulos.

The seminar focused on the core role that data play in the agrifood sector, mostly thanks to the advances in contexts like smart farming and the Internet of Things in agriculture, where data are collected from various sources (such as sensors, databases, radars and GPS, to quickly name a few), stored, processed and used for providing data-informed advice on e.g. farm management (affecting cultivation practices). The constantly increasing availability of agrifood data combined with the innovative ideas that are transformed into data-powered services leads to the creation of a new ecosystem of businesses that work on various aspects of agri-food data management and development of services based on these data. Using this as the basis, the seminar not only allowed the presentation of such innovative ideas by the participants but it gave them the opportunity to discuss them with the audience and identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks with real potential customers in order for them to evaluate the business model of their services. At the same time, the participation and contribution of key stakeholders and policy makers drove a discussion on how agricultural and rural development policy can support the data revolution for an enhanced productivity and sustainability in the wide agri-food chain.

The business model of NEUROPUBLIC's smart farming services is one of the aspects that makes a difference compared to the competition; instead of charging customers for the infrastructure (i.e. telemetric stations to be installed in the field, the use of the GAIA Sense panhellenic network for data transmission, the use of proprietary software for data entry, sharing etc., NEUROPUBLIC opts to offer all technological infrastructure for free and only charge customers (i.e. farmers) for the services that they use - and only for them - on a subscription-based model. This is really important for the potential users of these services, as the company mostly targets smallholder farmers who do not have the capacity nor the resources to invest in costly technological infrastructure but still they need to improve their production and reduces production costs. In this way, NEUROPUBLIC is the one to take the risk and invest for farmers instead of the farmers themselves only to receive a fraction of the financial benefits that farmers yield by using its smart farming services - how does this sound as a business plan?

One can only imagine that the case of NEUROPUBLIC is only one of the many available around, focusing on different steps of the agri-food chain and ranging from food production to retail sales. The explosion of data production and availability during the last years has a tremendous impact on the way that the agri-food sector is operating and the pressure applied in order to agriculture in order for it to meet the constantly increasing nutritional needs of the constantly growing population over the next years highlights the need for the exploitation of the available data.

You can find more information on the outcomes of the event in the recently published report (PDF) of EIP-AGRI.