LinkTADs Presentation at HORIZON 2020 Societal Challenge Information Week
Daniel Beltran-Alcrudo, the coordinator was invited to attend and present LinkTADs at the Societal Challenge 2’s (SC2) Dissemination Event on 27 June 2016. The event was jointly organised in Brussels by the EC Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI), the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) and the Research Executive Agency. This conference was organised in the frame of the SC2 Info Week information event, which targets potential applicants for the four calls published in the 2017 Work Programme of Societal Challenge 2 (Sustainable Food Security, Blue Growth, Rural Renaissance, and Bio-based innovation).
The presentation took place in the context of an afternoon session and aimed at showcasing interim results of selected projects (namely FOODINTEGRITY, SAFETYPACK, COMPARE, I.FAMILY and LinkTADs) funded under FP7 and Horizon 2020 under the umbrella of SC2 ‘Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry" and to discuss "lessons learnt" from the EU Research funding. This event focused on projects of relevance for the SC2 topics 2017 Work Programme of Horizon 2020, as it was considered that LinkTADs project could easily relate to research priorities identified for this Work Programme and that its outcomes could be of interest to potential applicants under 2017 calls.
Daniel’s presentation covered the project outline (challenge addressed, approach used and main objectives), a consortium overview (i.e. the list of partners by country and by type of organisation), project results, impact (and how it was measured and disseminated), lessons learnt, and knowledge gaps identified that would deserve additional research. The presentation was followed by a questions and answer session, which focused mostly on the cultural challenges and language barriers of working with Chinese institutions. The difficulty of working with the co-funding mechanisms in place for China were also highlighted, namely the fact that Chinese partners on H2020 projects will be funded from Chinese funds, which will only be released after the success of the project, often when the project as already started, compromising its running during the early months.