SEED, the final meeting

Partners in the SEED Project held their final partner meeting at the University of Ghent, Belgium on Tuesday 7th September 2021.  The meeting was in a hybrid meeting format (face to face and via Zoom) due to remaining Covid travel restrictions.

The Smart Entrepreneurial Education and training in Digital farming – SEED project develops skills in agriculture by introducing a digital transformation in the profession.

The project facilitates the development of skills and competences to meet labour market needs and also to be more flexible in anticipating future skills’ gaps for the digital agriculture sector. The partner meeting discussed the final actions in the project, which concludes at the end of September and dealt with final reporting for the project and remaining issues.

The partners finalised plans for the final peer-review event to be held on Wednesday 8th at ‘t Pand, a historic building in the centre of Ghent and for the final project conference at the Umbria Region office in Brussels on Thursday 9th September. Partners in the SEED Project held their final partner meeting and peer review event in Ghent and Brussels on 7-9 September 2021.

The project welcomed more than 50 participants from across Europe to examine the outputs and activities of the project and help establish a plan for the exploitation of the outcomes. The exploitation plan was based on a workshop at the University of Ghent on September 8th 2021, carried out with more than 40 peer reviewers from across Europe.

The plan was developed to describe the activities that should be carried out to enhance the successful exploitation of the project results in terms of future development after the project has been completed. Exploitation planning usually  involves the promotion and use of the products or processes and placing them on the market. An introduction to the project was given by the project coordinator Altheo Valentini from Umbraflor. The partners from Belgium, Italy, Slovakia and Spain presented the impact of the project in their own institutions, regions and countries. The Powerpoint slides are provided here.

Following this introduction, a peer review workshop activity took place where participants were invited to add their expertise to the project by answering the following four questions:

  1. In what areas should the SEED Project continue to make an impact?
  2.  Who are the key stakeholders/targets to take forward the work of SEED?
  3.  Which parts of the SEED outputs can most be used by others?
  4.  How can we engage companies, training organisations and Ministries of education?

Based on this review an exploitation plan was presented at the final conference of SEED on September 9th 2021.