How to improve stakeholders’ cooperation in the regional food sector to enhance the success of entrepreneurs? This was the main target when PoliRural with two other regional projects worked together on 10th of May 2022 in the “Meet together” event. Organizations of the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners of Häme, HAMK University of Applied Sciences and Smart&Lean Hub Oy invited 20 people from 14 different organizations to meet face-to-face.
The meeting place, Villa Elina, is a rural tourism company that offers restaurant and catering services in an old farmyard in Kärkölä municipality of Päijät-Häme province. Villa Elina appeared to be a new to everyone because the company is new and was founded the year as corona pandemic started. It proved to be an excellent place to re-start stakeholder meetings and meet new and old people for a long time.
The co-creation action started with brief presentations of regional strategies and work done earlier in the food sector. PoliRural brought into the discussion the international point of view and tools for the collaborative and future oriented process. Event participants worked in three groups. Each group embraced people from funding authorities/decision-makers, RDI actors, and rural/agriculture advisors. PoliRural Häme team facilitated the discussions and workflow in groups. Each group had a different task to consider and ideate enhancement of regional cooperation; how to improve entrepreneurs’ awareness and knowledge of different funding instruments, how to improve co-operation of advisors and RDI-actors, and how to achieve effective and scalable RDI results?
Based on discussions, each group named the main target group for activities. Typically, small food companies are SMEs and need help and support the most. Because there are already many good activities carried out at the regional and national level, discussions were very active. Both in Kanta-Häme and Päijät-Häme regions the food sector is recognized as one of the Smart Specialization themes, in their regional strategic plans 2022-2025. The regional food strategy and its theme Growth in Häme work has been implemented since 2007. Coordinator of the project has been the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners of Häme.
The three co-creation workshops came up with three new solutions to help food sector entrepreneurs and regional stakeholders: 1) service e.g., a digital game or platform that helps entrepreneurs to identify and get the best funding instruments for their needs, 2) companies’ service pathway to get tailored help and easily support from different actors in public/private sectors, 3) and thirdly the dynamic continuing project model.
The most important outcomes of the event were participants’ acquaintance with each other and knowledge exchange. The feedback was positive, and the next meeting was decided to continue for co-operation in the same format. A communication platform at Microsoft Teams for the stakeholders and regional companies has been established. The event generated new contacts and bilateral meetings to initiate and strengthen regional actors’ cooperation.
The first System Dynamic Model (SDM) was invented decades ago when the internet was still in its infancy. We have come a long way since then in terms of a tremendous increase in computing power, the availability of data, and ease of access to sophisticated tools and communication platforms. So, it is time to make SDM tools and the explanatory power of the SDM approach more widely available to those involved in policy and regional development. This is precisely what PoliRural has been doing for the past three years. Our SDM tool is based on a general rural model that contains 8 interconnected modules with over 300 parameters. This general model has been customised to 11 pilot regions, based on discussions with each pilot leadership team. With this tool, rural stakeholders can examine how trends may play out locally under the influence of different drivers of change. They can correct unwanted trends or achieve desired ones by tweaking policy interventions until an optimal mix is reached. This webinar will explain in more detail how the SDM tool was built, how it works, and how it is being used by stakeholders in PoliRural regions to improve rural planning. The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points
Semantic Explorer, or Semex, is a powerful text analytics tool that works with structured and unstructured data sources to provide insights to policy makers, researchers, foresight practitioners and others who need to make informed decisions while working with large amounts of information under time constraints. A typical foresight workshop, for example, requires a lot of research to prepare briefing notes, background papers, and lists of different kinds e.g. curated reading lists (CRL) with references. In PoliRural, Semex was used to improve the quality of this preparatory work and the productivity of those responsible for its execution. For example, Semex users can find out what the article, оr a CRL, is about by looking at the system-generated summary, geo-location, keyword frequencies, and sentiment scores associated with different paragraphs and topics – all without having to read the whole thing end to end. This workshop will explain how Semex was built, how it works, as well as its current and future potential based on the experience of some PoliRural pilot regions. The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points mentioned in the presentations.
Foresight as a discipline has been around for decades, with applications spanning a wide range of industries, from retail to rural development. Most recently, foresight has been used by the European Commission to develop a long-term vision for rural areas up to 2040. While foresight has been gaining in popularity, a common error is to think that foresight and future studies are synonymous. Future studies have their merit and are appropriate in certain contexts, but they are not the same as foresight, which is more action oriented and participatory rather than purely research based. This webinar will present the foresight framework used in the PoliRural project as a tool for managing change in rural regions. Participants will be introduced to key concepts and methods underpinning the framework, before learning about preliminary results of its implementation in the region of Monaghan (IE) and Gevgelija-Strumica (NMK). The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points mentioned in the presentations.
