Business plan for Sustainable Food Initiative
The Sustainable Food Initiative (SFI) is an innovation community looking for new approaches to answer some of the big challenges that we face in the production of food. Due to the changes in demographics, in the climate, in the way we use our resources and in the way that our cultures change, we need to explore new ways of producing sufficient, high quality food for a growing global population, whilst protecting food production ecosystems.
Assignment
Shaping a Sustainable Food consortium of multinationals, SMEs and knowledge institutes that accelerates innovation aimed at sustainability in agri & food value chains.
Project summary
Agri & Food value chains face a major challenge. They have to address societal challenges such as climate change, emissions, energy transition, health and consumer trust. In order to cope with these challenges innovation processes have to be accelerated: businesses and knowledge institutes have to find new ways to work together more intensively and generate more concrete results.
Our approach
BCI has facilitated a process in which all partners developed together a shared vision. An important element was connecting research and development programs (predominantly by multinationals and knowledge institutes) with regional clusters in Agro Food and High Tech. For the Agro Food cluster so called ‘field labs’ will be developed focused on valorization processes. Through the field labs local SMEs will be connected to national initiatives in order to test their new invented products and technologies in a small scale environment. Besides the field labs, living labs will be developed where new products can be tested amongst consumers.
In the process of setting up these co-operations, field labs and living labs our advisors combined their knowledge of innovation processes, businesses, knowledge institutes and authorities in order to make connections between these parties and keep them focused on the common goal: accelerating innovation aimed at developing healthy, sustainable and future proof food value chains.
Result
An aligned and detailed business plan for the Sustainable Food Initiative.
