FOODLAB Business Tool to Foster Entrepreneurship in the Agrifood Sector

Abstract

The FOODLAB project develop a project-based learning approach and an entrepreneurial spirit in students, foster interactions between stakeholders in Food innovation and guide the development of innovative projects for Ecotrophelia, the European competition on food innovation that bring hundreds of students to compete at European level with their idea. The FOODLAB project enable the setting up of a European Foodbusiness Transfer Laboratory to create/help future entrepreneurs, with dedicated modules to promote interactions with food companies, technical centres, research centres or business companies.
In FOODLAB project is we reach the aim to provide an innovative tools to help to build business models, business plans to serve students, high education institutions, and SMEs.
The tool built for this purpose is a client server application, highly customizable to follow the target needs. It allows to setup a complete business model and business plan providing template, defaults sentences, available example of business plan. The tool incorporate in a customizable template and related information to built-in high quality business plans, and provide kind of expert knowledge base for those who need a business plan or document to promote their idea or agrifood product for development.
The tool was validated with success by a team of students that participate to Ecotrophelia Italy 2016. Training modules and guidelines are also available to facilitate the use of the tool.
The tool can be used by students of High Education Institution, or workers and managers for training by also for business model and business plan implementation.
The tool showed a great potential to develop of targeted, standard business models and business plans that could be transferable to other domains or tailored to a specific type of product or food innovation.