On Wednesday 16 October the Ideas Generation Program on Smart Food began with thirty participants. It is an initiative of the action plan proposed by the UAB Research Park.
UAB Research Park organized a program to address the challenges of smart food, involving the society, the research community, industry and administration, following the innovation model of the quadruple helix.
The initiative includes a laboratory of ideas, an entrepreneurship program and a final stage of prototype and validation of the solutions at the UAB Open Labs, the network of open innovation spaces of the University.
Right now, the laboratory of ideas finished and the entrepreneurship program has begun with the participation of thirty researchers. They will work during two months to launch innovative and multidisciplinary projects prepared to solve challenges within the smart food sector.
Smart food is understood as food based on healthy foods through personal awareness. They are foods that increase their quality through the application of new technologies. In this context, the scientific community has defined four challenges in this field: reduction of food waste, reduction of plastics in the different stages of the agri-food chain, decrease the use of antibiotics in livestock production, and promote personalised nutrition. During the laboratory of ideas, consumers, researchers and business defined the needs and challenges of smart food throw design-thinking methodology in order to work to solve them during the entrepreneurship program.
The inauguration of Ideas generation program took place at the UAB Research Park and be offered by Vice Rector for Innovation and Strategic Projects Javier Lafuente and by the coordinator of the Generating Ideas programme Júlia Palma. Following their speeches was a presentation of the challenges proposed by different businesses and ideas laboratories on which researchers, businesses and consumers had been working.
The participants will participate in different creative and co-creation sessions to generate ideas based on the defined challenges. The objective of this first phase is to jointly define projects that respond to real needs of all sectors of society. Once the idea will be defined, the participants will go to the training phase, in which sector professionals will help them to validate it.
Finally, the Program will celebrate a competition to choose the top innovative project, which will receive a cash prize and six month in the UAB Research Park incubator, and to choose the UAB Open Labs project, who will participate in the last stage of the programme, the validation and prototyping.
More information at: Programme Generating Ideas
