The kick-off meeting of the project TAGs – “Technological and business innovation services to stimulate the local Agro-food ecosystems and to support a cross border collaboration among Local Action”, co–funded for 885.000,00 euro by Interreg V-A Greece-Italy Programme 2014-2020, was held in Bari on 7 September 2018, at the library of CREA.
The Lead beneficiary is the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA) – Agriculture and Environment Research Centre (AA) in Bari (Italy), while the project partners are: the European Research Center for Technologies Design and Materials (CETMA) in Brindisi (Italy), the Local Action Group “Terra dei Trulli e di Barsento” (GAL) in Putignano, the Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece (TEIWEST in Patras) and the Region of Western Greece.
The overall objective of the TAGs project is to strengthen the transfer of technical-scientific innovations from research and innovation centers to enterprises of agro-food sector in order to enhance their competitiveness through a set of services that will help them to increase productivity and improve efficiency in the use of resources.
The achievement of this objective will be favored also by the complementary action of policy makers, which should encourage it by designing policies aimed to support innovation in the Agri-food sector. More specifically, the research organizations involved in the project will identify and adjust technological solutions to the specific needs of the SMEs.
Starting from the state of art of precision farming technologies and services at national and EU level, a set of solutions able to ensure a significant increase in farm productivity with more environment-friendly processes (e.g. reduction in water and chemical product use) will be developed. The effectiveness of the solutions will be evaluated through the implementation of two different demonstrators in due different companies in Puglia and West Greece Regions.