6-7 October 2015, Brussels – Over 30 project results within the Knowledge Base Bio-Economy (KBBE), funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), are being presented at the ‘’Making more of Bioeconomy R&D Results’’ conference, taking place on the 6-7 October 2015 in Brussels.
Addressing the challenge highlighted by the European Commission to achieve a greater impact from the R&D results coming out of EC-funded projects, the conference is bringing together over 140 KBBE participants to discuss how to accelerate the market uptake of their most promising results, exchange knowledge and explore future cooperation opportunities.
The importance of increasing the impact of R&D results has been highlighted by Luc van Hoof, Executive Secretary, European Fisheries and Aquaculture Research Organisation (EFARO), who said that: ‘’Achieving greater impact is of prime importance for the Fisheries and Aquaculture sector, and key to addressing various environmental, research or policy challenges we are facing today. Allowing different stakeholders to engage in a knowledge exchange process and create closer ties between their activities will certainly contribute to a better uptake of bio-economy best practices’’.
The project coordinators and knowledge holders are meeting with exploitation experts who are providing advice on how to optimise project’s exploitation strategies, and how to more efficiently bring their results to the market, use them for policy improvement, or further research, depending on the needs. The event is also presenting an opportunity for participants to share project results with fellow researchers in the same field in order to feed other research projects or create new consortia to further develop the results.
The event is a part of a larger initiative to increase the impact of bio-economy research at the EU-level. ‘’Experience has shown that professional coaching can increase the success rate of commercialisation of public R&D results by factor ten’’ said Katharina Krell of Greenovate! Europe, an expert group dedicated to speed up the market introduction of public research.