SMAFINE · SMart Agriculture & Food INnovation Ecosystem

One of the main challenges of the Innovation Ecosystem in 'modest' or 'moderate' innovator regions is the lack of persistent and trustworthy cooperation between local stakeholders and external investors. This gap results in an insuperable obstacle for emerging startups that have no tools and occasions to scale up and develop their businesses. Lacking this, Europe is missing the chance to brighten up the overall enterprise system as thousands of brilliant ideas don’t generate positive spillovers. To tackle this issue, SMAFINE goal is to create a strong ecosystem based on three main pillars:1. Support local stakeholders - SMAFINE will implement activities of capacity building for local stakeholder, supporting the connection between innovation stakeholders and foreign investors; 2. Support foreign stakeholders - Foster the bond between foreign and local stakeholders through well-defined activities; 3. Co-creation with policy makers at local level and at 'modest' or 'moderate' innovator regions level. SMAFINE consortium is composed by 6 partners (EY Advisory SPA; Deep Ecosystems 500 UG; RootCamp GmbH; Foreningen til drift af TechBBQ; Comune di Matera (CTE Matera); Sweden Foodtech AB) coming from 4 European countries and it will implement a 2 years project that aims to build a solid ecosystem in 'modest' or 'moderate' innovator region such the South of Italy, developing a testbed involving a wide participation of national and international actors as incubators, accelerators, company-builders, innovation agencies, business clubs and networks, public and private VCs and their networks, national and regional authorities.