On Wednesday 26 January 2022, the Autonomous University of Barcelona hosted (together with the Government of Catalonia – Ministry of Climate Action, Food, and Rural Agenda), the 5th stakeholder meeting of the InnoHEIs project in Catalonia. This edition was hosted together with the Interreg Europe QUALIFY project, aiming at fostering synergies between the to projects in order to achieve common goals, as well as integrating the initiatives that have complementarities in the country.
This edition built on discussing aspects linked to a specific sector in order to gather concrete learnings that can be used analogously to other domains. The QUALIFY project tackles aspects linked to the improvement of competitiveness in agrifood SMEs. Therefore, InnoHEIs vision bases on defining methodologies and improving policies to see how universities and research institutions could make a better use of their capacities and infrastructure to address this challenge, and propose innovation-based solutions.
In the first part of the meeting, challenges of the agrifood sector were addressed, discussing which polies and strategies could be considered to provide solutions and improve the situation. Then, under the InnoHEIs’ team moderation, participant stakeholders discussed ways and methodologies to foster the collaboration university – companies to tackle those challenges, assessing ways in which public policies and instruments could support them in this direction.
