Europe
July 28, 2016
A combine harvester on a farm. Image courtesy of CommBeBiz.
This year, Europe’s biggest science festival, the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF16), was held in Manchester in the UK. Notable speakers included Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the scientists at the vanguard of the exciting genome technology CRISPR-Cas9, and director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, as well as Andre Geim, professor at the University of Manchester UK who shared a Nobel prize for his discovery of the wonder material graphene.
About 4,500 thinkers, innovators, policy makers, journalists and educators from more than 90 countries attended ESOF16. One of the highlights that caught our attention was from CommBeBiz, an organisation partly funded by the European Commission, and their Innovation Awards in research and development for food, agriculture and biotechnology. These awards celebrated some of the most innovative work emerging within the area of bioeconomy across Europe. The bioeconomy comprises parts of the economy that use renewable biological resources from crops to forests, fish, animals and micro-organisms – to produce food, materials and energy.
Earlier this year, CommBeBiz circulated a survey among industry representatives and policy makers. The results revealed that there is quite a poor understanding of what the bioeconomy is and how it affects people’s day-to-day lives. Although not an altogether surprising result, facts such as these further support the need to improve communication surrounding European food, agriculture, biotechnology and forestry research and the vast opportunities that can result from scientific innovation.
CommBeBiz announced a number of winners that are sure to change the face of food and agriculture in the years to come. These included Stepla, a software that monitors the condition of farm animals in real time; Taste of Science, an online platform inspiring open innovation in the food industry; and BioAgriBooster, a project that produces a novel microbial bio-stimulant for sustainable agriculture.
Each of these winning projects benefits from a tailored support package to help them reach their innovation goals, an important step towards innovative scientific thinking in Europe.
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