About ATTRACTISS
ATTRACTISS – AcTivate and TRigger ACTors to deepen the function of Innovation Support Services – is a 6-year Horizon Europe funded project, which aims to improve & embed competencies, approaches, instruments & governance models for Member States (MS) AKIS and specifically for Innovation Support Services (ISS) as a crucial AKIS actor. The ISS enables the acceleration of individual grassroots innovative ideas to come to fruition & generate solutions for the transition process to a more sustainable agriculture & forestry sector.
With a consortium of 17 partners representing 13 European countries, ATTRACTISS intends to set up an EU wide network for ISSs that allows to connect, develop a common understanding, vision and capacities about their roles & functions within the AKIS. This will ultimately lead to the development of an ecosystem in favour of Multi-Actor Approaches (MAA) & innovative projects, building upon and giving continuity to previous initiatives to focus on ISSs, boost best practices and broaden the network. This methodology will also enable institutional dialogue among ISSs & Managing Authorities that will lead to targeted CAP interventions for the integration of ISS within the AKIS.
Objectives
The objective of ATTRACTISS is to improve & embed competencies, approaches, instruments & governance models for Member States (MS) AKIS and specifically for Innovation Support Services (ISS) as a crucial AKIS actor, accelerating individual grassroots innovative ideas to come to fruition & generating solutions for the transition process to a more sustainable agriculture & forestry sector.
ATTRACTISS has three specific objectives:
- Empower ISS & all AKIS actors, through capacity building & provision of effective methods & supportive tools, to discover innovative ideas & enable uptake in a co-creative way thereby fostering AKIS ecosystem building to support the transition to sustainable and circular agriculture & forestry systems;
- Support Managing Authorities (MA) in all EU MS to organise & monitor efficient support for ISS;
- Provide support for new actors in AKIS processes to better facilitate cocreation approaches involving farming, practitioners & research centres.
Work packages
WP1 will build on existing knowledge and experience to establish a conceptual framework concerning functions and competences required for an ISS. Particularly, WP1 will:
- develop a common understanding about ISSs to enable the 27 MS to organise feasible services and embed them within their AKISs;
- generate new knowledge about the actors providing ISSs in the MSs, the functions that they are performing, their organisational models and the AKIS governance models in which they operate;
- assess capacity assets and needs for setting up and/or improving the functioning of innovation support and define ISSs curricula;
- design impactful pathways to empower and embed ISSs.
The aim of WP2 is to activate a dynamic process of multi-actor engagement mainly involving the EU ISS community and actors of the AKIS, in order to:
- develop a strategic plan to engage the ISS community and AKIS’ actors;
- connect innovation actors to improve ISS performance for sustainable farming in the EU;
- widen the ATTRACTISS network and cross-fertilize with a wide range and diversity of innovation actors (projects, networks, individual farmers, etc.) covering all 27 MSs.
WP3 will inspire ISSs with methods and tools on how to discover innovative grassroots ideas from farmers and how to enable relevant actors to work out these ideas in a co-creative way. Its specific objectives:
- map, identify and try out of innovation generation and support methods from inside and outside agriculture in a co-creative way with actors from all 27 MS;
- identify major barriers but also opportunities towards an innovation enabling environment;
- feed and inspire ISSs by offering a user-friendly portal website of innovation generation support methods and tools, including recommendations on how to build an innovation enabling environment.
The aim of this WP is to foster and improve best practice for ISSs and other key actors engaging in multi-actor activities; and to support enhanced understanding of these approaches and their benefits to underpin greater adoption amongst all AKIS actors and all MS.
This will be done by:
- delivering capacity building activities and actions for ISS key actors across all MS (“training the trainer”; effective tools);
- promoting cross organisational learning on ISS through the exchange of good practice and peer to peer review activity (e.i., online key actor forum, IRL and online events, study tours).
WP5 will facilitate a better participation in ISS by supporting national and regional AKIS actors for a faster promotion of co-creation, knowledge exchange, capacity building and evaluation of ISS measures. WP5 will:
- advance an innovation ecosystem amongst all AKIS actors;
- improve knowledge exchange between ISSs, Managing Authorities and AKIS actors at regional/ national and EU level;
- develop recommendations for managing authorities how to monitor and evaluate ISSs performances;
- support capacity building for managing authorities and all AKIS coordination bodies to achieve better embeding of ISS within AKIS.
WP6 is responsible for widely communicating, disseminating, and engaging with Managing Authorities (MAs) and AKIS actors, through:
- ensuring that results, findings, tools, and recommendations are better available, shared, and accessible in the 27 EU Member States;
- developing awareness and engage the ISS community;
- exploiting the results after the project implementation, to enhance the capacity to further support the improvement of the functioning of ISSs across Europe.
WP7 is designed to actively ensure the smooth strategic and scientific coordination and monitoring of all ATTRACTISS activities, timely implementation of the project and efficient fulfilment of administrative and financial requirements. It will also develop the Data Management Plan.
Consortium
Network
ModernAKIS, modernisation of Agriculture through more efficient and effective Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems (AKIS), aims to improve AKIS actors’ capacities to leverage individual, organizational and systemic resources needed for the transformation towards more coherent, effective, and efficient AKIS systems and the transition to a more sustainable management and use of natural resources in farming and forestry. To this end it will build and foster a European network of at least 1.000 key AKIS actors, including AKIS coordination bodies, from all EU MS, who will act as linchpins in the transformation of the AKIS systems towards a more effective governance and the modernization of the European agri-food sector.
EU-FarmBook – supporting knowledge exchange between all AKIS actors in the European Union The current state of the art is that the project EURAKNOS has analysed the knowledge of 28 Horizon funded Thematic Networks (TNs) and linked operational groups (OGs) and developed a vision and guidelines for a digital knowledge reservoir for an EU-wide agriculture and forestry practice. EUREKA has continued this effort by examining 120 Horizon funded MA projects within the EIP-AGRI and developing a ‘proof of concept’ of such a knowledge reservoir building on the results of the EURAKNOS project. EU-FarmBook will capitalize on the results of EURAKNOS and EUREKA, making the data taken up in the platform fairer and adding necessary functionalities to the platform based on the users’ needs such as interactive peer to peer interaction and user content evaluation tools. Moreover EU-FarmBook will assure the linkage to traditional dissemination channels, such as agricultural journals, on farm demo activities, and training and education initiatives.