Supporting meat research in europe

Thursday 30 August 2007

In pursuit of stronger competitiveness
To become a leader in the international knowledge-based economy the European Union will attempt to secure its goal in two steps: developing the European Research Area and boosting R&D investment towards the 3% of GDP target. The first step entails building partnerships between private (e.g., SMEs) and public organisations (e.g., universities and research organisations). With this in mind, a focus on the meat research field has emerged and the EU is creating a European Co-operative Platform to effectively forge public-private alliances between industry, research community and policy-makers at the trans-regional level from a bottom-up approach.

Nowadays, science and technology research groups and other organisations fail to collectively work with agro-food SMEs in Europe. The four mains hurdles are: SMEs lack information about European and regional research and innovation public policies; a deficient knowledge about active scientific and technological capacities abroad; missing "technological mediators" that would help increase SMEs' participation and act as the contact point promoting research initiatives; and lack of mechanisms failing to draw in interested SMEs in research initiatives.

link to website