The EUREKA project
There is an increasing drive to bridge the gap between science and practice in the agricultural sector. Increasingly complicated challenges in agriculture require collaborative, complementary, and co-created knowledge and innovation that is ready to implement in practice. This requires a bottom up approach with farmers, foresters and other rural businesses working with researchers to action innovation. These approaches have been actioned under H2020 EU funding streams through the development of multi-actor projects.
EUREKA builds on the work of its sister project EURAKNOS. It is a H2020 project that aims to ensure the long-term and wide use of practical knowledge and innovative solutions, generated by multi-actor projects. EUREKA has brought together 21 multi-actors from 16 member states and 48 supporting organizations, to co-create a stronger and reinforced EU wide agricultural knowledge base by developing an open source e-platform, called the FarmBook. This two-sided market platform, like Facebook, will address the needs and improve the connections between farmers, foresters and advisors.
What is the RAU’s role in EUERKA?
The Royal Agricultural University (RAU) is leading a work package to understand knowledge demand through profiling the needs and preferences of end-users, this will help to inform the actual design of the FarmBook as well as verifying the preferred communication and dissemination channels used to promote EUREKA outputs.
What will the RAU be doing?
Persona development and user journey mapping is often used by service providers to inform design, ensure that products are tailored to the end-user and ultimately that they are fit for purpose. Personas are fictional characters that help to represent a group of people and include key characteristics (e.g. region, education gender). User journey mapping helps to understand how users solve problems, in this context, how they access knowledge to overcome an issue within agriculture.
The RAU alongside Leap Forward Group (Belgium) will be using these techniques to run 4 regional workshops across the EU to understand the diversity as well as similarities between potential end-users. This qualitative study will feed into the development of a large-scale survey to quantitatively assess preferences.
How can I be involved in EUREKA?
Follow the EUREKA social media pages below and sign up to the newsletter for updates:
You can also contact one of the RAU team directly for more information:
Emily Bull: emily.bull@rau.ac.uk
The EUREKA project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 862790