Project summary

The food industry, perceived as traditional, is, in fact, a challenging driver for innovation and growth today. String Project unifies regions sharing the ambition to improve the innovation capacity of their food clusters, enabling them to meet the increasingly diversified needs and the growing demand for larger quantities of food. These clusters are often impeded in their development and thus fail to efficiently support the innovation eco-system and hinder the partners’ access to new markets. The shared bottlenecks of agro-food innovation eco-systems –often rooted in the malfunctioning of policy instruments– urge partners to work on solutions adaptable to specific regional contexts.

All STRING-regions have been renown for their food production traditions, and for their innovation potentials. They all are engaged in food innovation and production in different roles. The overall objective of the partners - independent from their development level and the strength of cohesion in their regional food sectors – is to improve the performance and implementation efficiency of development policies and programmes related to food R&D&I and clusterization to promote innovation value chains for the sector. By deepening cluster integration and creating more added value - contributing to smart growth – each region will reach this ambition.