Within the framework of the action plan for Catalonia, 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 first stage was a Laboratory of Ideas, several workshops with all the actors to meet their needs and preferences in relation of smart food and the best solutions to address it.

This initiative promotes reflection on complex, conflictive and emerging areas of knowledge taking citizen perception of a specific subject as a starting point. It fosters the culture of innovation, the entrepreneurial spirit and helps to provide solutions in a specific area. The method used is Design Thinking which is defined as a creative process for the resolution of problems centred on people observing user needs to offer effective and viable solutions. In short, it is a learning process for the implementation of improvements.

In this document you can see the results of the laboratory of Ideas.

Once the lines of research had been selected in the Laboratory of Ideas validation phase, the project continued to the next stage which was the Idea generation program. This is an initiative that aims to contribute to encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit, culture of innovation and provide support for shaping the ideas of research workers and doctoral students of Catalonia focussed on the challenge defined by the community, but with a highly multidisciplinary profile with the idea of favouring cross-fertilization.