The European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) was launched by the European Commission in 2012. The Europe 2020 Flagship Initiative "Innovation Union" specifies European Innovation Partnerships (EIP) as a new tool for speeding up innovation through linking existing policies and instruments.
The EIP-AGRI is one of the five European Innovation Partnerships that were launched to boost the EU’s capacity to innovate. The EIP-AGRI focuses on agriculture and forestry, whereas the other EIPs target issues related to active and healthy ageing, water, raw materials as well as smart cities and communities. The idea behind the EIPs is that they should be challenge-driven, focus on societal benefits and rapid modernisation and provide favourable conditions for cooperation between research and innovation partners in order to achieve better and faster results compared to existing approaches.
Each EIP has tailor-made goals. The EIP-AGRI has been set up as a new tool to help create an innovation culture in the agricultural and forestry sector with the aim of fostering a competitive and sustainable sector that "achieves more from less" and contributes to
- ensuring a steady supply of food, feed and biomaterials, and
- the sustainable management of the essential natural resources on which farming and forestry depend by working in harmony with the environment.
To achieve this aim, the EIP-AGRI brings together innovation actors (farmers, advisors, researchers, businesses, NGOs, etc) and helps to build bridges between research and practice. EIP-AGRI activities apply an overarching concept based on the "interactive innovation model": collaboration between various actors to make best use of complementary types of knowledge (e.g. scientific, practical, organisational, etc) in view of co-creation and diffusion of solutions/opportunities ready to implement in practice. Interactive innovation goes further than "linear innovation", which stands for a science and research driven approach, where new ideas resulting from research brought into practice through one-way (linear) knowledge transfer, and where change and innovation are expected to be engineered, predictable and would be planned rationally. In "interactive" innovation, building blocks for innovations are expected to come from science, or from practice and intermediaries, including farmers, advisors, NGOs, businesses etc. as actors in a bottom-up process. Interactive innovation includes existing (sometimes tacit) knowledge which is not always purely scientific. It may also generate from a group of actors without necessarily having researchers involved.
The EIP-AGRI is also about creating synergies between existing policies, most notably the EU’s 2014-2020 rural development policy and its research and innovation policy which is known as Horizon 2020. The EIP-AGRI focuses on forming partnerships, using bottom-up approaches and linking actors in different types of interactive innovation projects such as the Operational Groups under national / regional Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) and multi-actor projects under Horizon 2020. EIP-AGRI Focus Groups are a multi-actor networking activity organised at the EU level.
The EIP-AGRI aims at a flexible and open system for the creation of a multiplicity of Operational Groups. Once the 2014-2020 Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) are adopted, funding will become available for EIP-AGRI innovation projects that look at tackling specific practical issues and opportunities according to the needs of the agricultural and forestry sector. These projects will be carried out by so-called EIP Operational Groups. The composition of an Operational Group is tailored to the objectives of the specific project and will vary from project to project – they can be made up of - for instance - farmers, farmers’ organisations, advisors, researchers, NGOs, businesses or anyone else who has something to bring to the table in terms of ideas, knowledge and solutions. Linking with farming practice is key.
