Today, the food/drink industry is among the largest industries in Europe, accounting for approximately 4.3 million jobs and highly demanding in all raw material use (energy, water etc.). The environmental burden presented by the industry is equally high, hence, making the impacts of environmental endeavours within the area greatly effective, relative to their scale. EcoTroFood aims at improving the access of the food industry to information and knowledge on eco-innovation, in particular for SMEs and service providers. The services developed within the project will become part of a European Food Eco innovation Platform for the provision of information to, and the sharing of knowledge with, relevant eco-innovation stakeholders.
These objectives are addressed in 3 ways:
1. Advancing creativity and formation of eco-innovative technical solutions/products/services:
- Holding 34 national Eco-Trophelia business-plan competitions generating new eco-innovative products evaluated on life-cycle performance;
- Providing support to SMEs for product development and marketing of winning products at a national and European level.
2. Bridging the gap between research/development and market for marked-ready eco-innovations of SMEs:
- Holding 5 national pilot mini-matchmaking-forums and 2 European matchmaking-forums facilitating access of 100 eco-innovative SMEs in food to investors and first-users;
- Developing a widely recognised Quality Certificate for trust, credibility and “proof of concept”;
- Developing new participant interaction methodologies (“speed-dating”);
- Developing new incentives for first-users (public procurement ranking methods).
3. Creating a useful stakeholder networking tool on eco-innovation where SMEs, Universities, Research Centres, investors, (first-) users, Clusters, etc. can easily connect across Europe.
