Health benefits have become a central guiding point for food purchasing decisions, favouring agrifood producers that can credibly market these benefits. Short food supply chains (SFCs) empower local producers who have a large competitive advantage in this new agrifood market. However, current retail is well below market potential. InoSens has integrated providers of mature ICTs, supply chain analysis consultants, and various end-user groups for an innovative SFC-facilitating concept, which directly addresses end-user needs not satisfied by existing business models. In baseball, the pitcher sets-up up the play and leads the entire team. InoSens seeks an experienced researcher with SFC expertise and advanced modelling skills that the company does not possess and are not available on the local labour market. The Innovation Associate will allow for several challenges the company is presently facing to be effectively addressed: system complexity, lack of key structural parameters and insufficient data. The Innovation Associate will develop a dynamic and precise methodology (including a modelling tool) to empower informed decisions for future innovation projects, and identify the best market for demo launch of the concept. The Innovation Associate will be positioned as a senior analyst working full time on the project. S/he will report directly to the CEO of the company, who will be personally responsible to provide ad hoc support for his work and development from company’s staff and capacities. InoSens embraces a startup company culture, we will be highly reactive to identify and react to the professional development needs of the Innovative Associate and smoothen her/his transfer into the private sector. The company strategy favours long-term investments with people, therefore the optimal scenario for the company is to employ the Innovation Associate beyond the lifetime of PITCHER.

GATES will develop a serious game-based training platform, in order to train professionals across the agricultural value chain on the use of Smart Farming Technologies (SFT), thus allowing deploying its full economic and environmental potential in European agriculture. The positive impact on the adoption of Smart Farming Technologies (SFT) in crop farming has been well established for the last 10 years. In fact, many SFT are available at present time, but farmers find it difficult to grasp which are the technologies that can be used and furthermore, which are the productivity and environmental benefits brought by their adoption. Likewise, SFT companies face barriers in the commercialization of their equipment due to the lack of knowledge and training of the farmer community. GATES provides the farmer community, agronomical students, extension services and the SFT industry sales force an easy to use and understand gaming experience that will allow a first approach to the concept of SFT, their uses, available equipment and simulation on the adoption of such technologies. GATES will develop a near-to-market (TRL7) serious game-based training platform that, through the use of a range of gaming technologies (3D scenarios, interactive storytelling, modeling and data), will train professionals and other stakeholders in the value chain in the use of SFT. GATES will develop a cross-platform (Desktop/Mobile/Web) serious gaming available for Android, iOS and Windows featuring online and offline synchronized modes. GATES will represent a successful example on the use of serious gaming as a training tool, applicable on formal and informal educational settings, on a complex and multidisciplinary subject such as SFT, benefitting from serious gaming capabilities such as virtual environments and worlds, personalized tutorial tools, competition between peers, wide personalization to real life and simulated case scenarios, etc.

The overall goal of our project is to achieve trust in a data-driven food system by implementing Digital Responsibility Goals for the food sector. This will enable new levels of innovation for example in food safety, sustainability, personalized nutrtion, reduction of food waste and fair conditions throughout the entire food chain. The programme works on a clear strategic roadmap (a new virtual food system), a set technological enablers, demonstration of solutions, a structured funding programme with open calls, and measures to guide and support the food ecosystem of third party beneficiaries, citizens, stakeholders. As a consortium, we maintain the perspective that technology is not a means to an end, but acts merely as an empowering enabler, providing the means to achieve a wide variety of innovative and valuable use cases. Use cases that promise to serve a broader audience, provided that adequate access also is considered as a prerequisite. Currently however, technology is primarily developed from the perspective and needs of corporations and / or authorities- a limitation that risks perpetuating or further exacerbating the above-mentioned lack of trust within the markets that they serve. With a more diverse and human-centric driven perspective we believe the new use cases that will emerge and the technology development required to realise them will contribute to a more sustainable ecosystem that is “trustworthy by default”. To truly design for trust, the entire chain of activities and underlying assumptions towards developing technology has to be based on fundamental values like responsibility, privacy and user control - especially when dealing with valuable and sensitive food data. The starting point of all assumptions needs to be the user and their values - not a business model or (legitimate) state interests.

For the EU deep-tech startup scene to grow sustainably and achieve its potential impact, access to real market problems and test beds is required. Driven by real market needs, or as STARTUP3 defines it, Key Performance Areas, the project builds and facilitates an open and collaborative ecosystem for high impact deep-tech innovators and corporates and acts as a cross-border/sectoral market-maker. The project aims to generate, take up, ensure market penetration and further capitalize on the growth and impact potential of profound research by providing access to dynamic and 3-phase across the board growth support framework UPTAKE-UPGRADE-UPSCALE. The catalysation is aimed at creating synergies across the Europe, networking, raising understanding of the benefits of deep-tech technology and stimulating their uptake - Cluster Missions and Clusters-Corporate Assembly. The STARTU3 consortium is a fusion between geographically scattered Clusters (POLE SCS, LITC, ITC) international innovation and Tech-transfer specialists (INO and EKT), SME focused on upscaling research and technology (AGENSO), startup studio (HOLA-UP).

New sensing devices and technologies are the key in addressing numerous challenges that agriculture is facing today. Namely, to provide more food for the ever-growing population, a number of biophysical parameters of plants, soil and food products need to be monitored and measured constantly, thus providing valuable data needed to optimize the entire agricultural process. In addition, the corresponding actuating technologies responsible for applying various measures (e.g. irrigation, fertilization) need to become more precise and allow variable rate inputs with a resolution down to an individual plant. To provide novel sensing and actuating solutions able to address the burning issues in agriculture today, NOCTURNO will bring together and synergistically advance several highly promising research directions which have been investigated separately in the last decade: wave-matter interactions, plasmonics, complex media and artificial materials, acoustic, electromagnetics, optics, bionanosensing. The Project will focus on development of sensors and actuators based on non-conventional propagation of acoustic waves in artificial media, electromagnetic/optical sensors based on metasurfaces, and advanced manufacturing technologies including 3D printing, laser-micromachining technology, and e-beam lithography with the aim to provide practical solutions for the fabrication of novel acoustic and metasurface-based sensors and actuators. NOCTURNO proposes an exchange programme which brings together three European academic institutions, two European SME companies, and two third-country universities. The consortium has the specific expertise in the fields listed above and it will create synergies that will first advance the current level of fundamental scientific knowledge and then support its transformation into innovative products with the high potential to revolutionize the agri-food sector.