Well a month ahead of the interregional partner meeting in Milan, 14 participants of the local stakeholder group in Lombardy Region met on 18th April and worked on future topics for the implementation of the RUMORE project. One major aspect was a discussion about the organisation of the interregional learning event in May. The stakeholders identified the best way to present the territorial context and innovation system of Lombardy, the rural-urban governance model and approach, and to introduce the study visit of the second day of the event, when all project partners visit some examples of rural innovation in the course of the living lab.
The stakeholders also discussed about possible connections with good practices from other project partners and expressed their wish to obtain more information and networking with the respective partners. Three examples underline the added value of the project in finding new solutions and approaches in rural urban governance, for innovative processes and applied technologies:
1. The innovative programme for sustainable circular agri-food chains in Amsterdam; and in particular how to combine technology in agri-food and how the public-private model in the food and organic waste platform is organised. The Amsterdam case bears similarities with an ongoing EU project in Milan (Agrifood Hub of Openagri project, UIA, Municipality of Milan).
2. The agrofood partnership in the Region Central Macedonia; and in particular to understand better their activities, because in different ways and with a different organisational structure, the outputs of this partnership are similar to the ones of RIS3 Cluster in Lombardy.
3. The biodiversity and agri-food value chain in the Region Central Macedonia; because it is very similar to the “Rice DNA traceability protocol” by the Lombardian Distretto Riso e Rane and other projects which are applying innovative agri-food "sciences" to give value to local biodiversity and create new value agri-food chain.
Moreover, the stakeholders analysed a call from the Rural Development Programme, to find and make use of different funds for new value chains under investigation by an experimental working group. This was born as parallel discussion and operative group formed by local stakeholders of the urban-rural metropolitan area of Milan.