Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SKIN (Short supply chain Knowledge and Innovation Network)

Teaser

SKIN is an ambitious initiative of 21 partners in 14 countries in the area of Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs). Addressing the main issue of the research devide and a better deployment of existing scientific knowledge in SFSC.The SKIN project originates from an analysis of the...

Summary

SKIN is an ambitious initiative of 21 partners in 14 countries in the area of Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs). Addressing the main issue of the research devide and a better deployment of existing scientific knowledge in SFSC.
The SKIN project originates from an analysis of the role of Short Food Supply Chain’s in achieving the twin goal of sustainable agricultural production in economic, environmental and social terms (including multifunctionality) and enhanced competitiveness of European farmers.
The food chain usually starts on the farm within the agricultural sector, where some goods may already be processed. Although competitiveness and sustainability of the agrifood sector can be enhanced through innovation at the level of individual farms or producers, additional gains can be obtained through innovation at the level of the supply chain itself. This requires cooperation between the different actors involved as well as leadership to drive the overall innovation agenda.
The main challenge is that the broad SKIN community uses the project’s activities and results and that the network is committed to continue ‘permanent learning’ after the project’s end, as a European association permanently working for the improvement of SFSCs efficiency and for the benefit of stakeholders and growth in the sector. The first step for building the community is represented by the identification of good practices in short supply chains across Europe. All partners have collected, analysed and classified more than 100 “good practices”, now available on the SKIN website, that will be also used during the set-up of regional nodes, to allow a deeper penetration of existing knowledge into practice. The work on good practices will also allow identifying key issues (hindrances or opportunities) around SFSCs. Such issues will be the main themes of 6 “innovation challenges workshops” the purpose of which is to stimulate stakeholders to propose new ideas for innovation based research or innovation uptake. These will be supported in a coaching phase where consortium partners deliver guidance to stakeholders for the full development of those innovative ideas.
The overall SKIN objective is to tackle such fragmentation in the access to different practice models, systematise information and data available, empower the potential innovators in the agrofood chains and create a European community, serving as a permanent platform for knowledge exchange, transnational cooperation, promotion of innovation and generation of input to policy making.
The SKIN approach is precisely built in order to bring together these actors and make them cross-fertilize their knowledge and approaches, thus promoting knowledge-based agriculture and innovation-driven research.

Work performed

During the first months of SKIN activities, it has been developed a framework for the identification of Good Practices (GPs) on SFSC, producing an interactive, intuitively navigable handbook regarding their identification, collection and recording. Moreover, it was provided to all partners a ‘GPs recording template’, generating information relevant to end-users and EIP-AGRI practice abstracts.
An important set of tasks aimed at running a comprehensive scouting of good practices across Europe was made available. SKIN partners are actively performing the collection of good practices, divided in two phases. During phase 1 all partners have collect good practices in their regions and/or countries, resulting in more than 100 good practices (http://www.shortfoodchain.eu/good-practices/). Based on these, overall trends and bottlenecks were identified and foresight scenarios for the development of short food supply chains in Europe were developed. In phase 2, which is starting now, additional good practices will be identified in regions/countries outside the SKIN area in order to enlarge the GPs repository and cover different cases.
SKIN partners have built up a strategy on ‘How to create the stakeholder database’ and an internal stakeholders list of contacts was created with already 2.200 stakeholders. The SKIN community is growing, so far there are 130 registered people. Guidelines for learning and brokering activities and for stakeholders engagement have been delivered and used as main tool during networking events.
The organization of 6 Innovation Challenge Workshops (ICWs) represents an important occasion to strengthen the network, meet stakeholders, share GPs and catch new ideas. The first workshop was held on 24th April 2018 between Belgium and The Netherlands.
started the preparation of activities to deliver support to multidisciplinary groups to promote new innovative projects, likely to bear a substantial and demonstrable impact in terms of improvements of efficiency and sustainability of SFSC. Preparation activities include coaching, internal coaching for trainers, identification of about 35 Regional Nodes around SKIN countries.
The communication strategy, channels (website and twitter), formats (leaflet, poster, roll-up and short description) and visual identity were released. A web repository hosts the SKIN good practices and journalistic articles, e-Newsletters were produced.

Final results

The tasks related to the identification of GPs, enable users to comprehensively ascertain the individual components of a good practice. The specific elements are relevant not only to SFSCs but to all SMEs. The evaluation criteria can be used for evaluating also other projects.
The overall trends and bottlenecks that are identified based on the collection of good practices are being used during the foresight activities resulting in concrete and provocative inputs into different community building events. These community building events will make the collected GPs accessible and exploitable by those who would benefit the most from them.
The community building and animation will continue to expand the internal contacts list and registered database by engaging more stakeholders. Other ICWs will be organized and reported in form of articles and short video interviews available for dissemination.
The adoption of the bottom-up approach and creation of Regional Nodes at regional and EU/global level will be implemented. Local stakeholder involvement will allow identifying the specific needs of the local markets. This will facilitate the knowledge exchange between scientists and practitioners on agrifood practices due to the foreseen coaching sessions where the existing knowledge is brought.

The expected impact related to communication and dissemination activities are outlined below:
• Multimedia and storytelling formats:
- Video formats: 6 videos to be produced among the following formats: Project institutional video short, Project institutional video long and web videos;
- Video interviews: 5-6 interviews to be carried out at each Innovation Challenge Workshop;
- Storytelling: 6 pageflows, to be related to the topics covered at the Innovation Challenge Workshops;
• Press and News releases: at least 6
• Journalistic articles and interviews: 6
• E-Newsletters: 1 every 6 months (approximately).
• Social Media:
- LinkedIn: 130 members;
- Twitter: 200 followers;
- Facebook: 100 members.
Thanks to all the networking and dissemination activites at different levels, SKIN is obtain high visibility making people aware of the different aspects related to the SFSC and to the importance of food quality through the whole chain.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.shortfoodchain.eu.