t is better accessible for use in breeding, and that breeders could make use of the most advanced new breeding technologies such as gene editing, as these would enable the development of the best performing varieties in the shortest time frame possible.
Figure 3. A win-win proposition for public and private innovators: an EU-wide virtual public-private breeding workflow with growing scope and predictive value by integrating outcomes from science and breeding in a data format of use for both parties. Public science may integrate past and current outcomes from e.g., genetics, biology, environmental conditions and soil, whereas private breeders may integrate outcomes and cultivation conditions from breeding experiments using such data. Artificial Intelligence approaches and smart queries and visualizations will offer evidence-based innovation starting points for both scientists and breeders. Progressive standards in e.g., variety testing could be used to set direction and focus. Critical will be a governance concept safeguarding public and private interests, and a self-supporting financing scheme to develop and maintain such platform.
ES: What other types of innovation do we need?
The agricultural value chains are operated by multiple stakeholders in an open market setting and tend to be locked in scope and dimension. The arrival of new products can’t be automatically handled and often will need risk investments or phasing out of less promising activities. With the current state of know-how in biology, chemistry, breeding and refining, together with the societal pressure to move to renewable solutions, it is very possible that an open innovation approach across the value chain from academia to end-product producers, kicks-off demand for innovative plant-derived products for new applications that require sufficiently high volumes and offer fair economics.
The challenge is to develop brainstorming sessions where one brings together the right combination of expertise to develop and characterize meaningful, yet hypothetical product or production opportunities. Such trajectories face the difficulty that they easily turn out to be a waste of time for some of the stakeholders as value contribution steps and value share principles are determined on concrete outcomes. A nice example of the power of “value chain-wide” open innovation is provided by the car industry where Tesla backwards and forwards integrates into the value chain, in an attempt to rethink production machinery, component production, end-product, transport, sales and aftersales, while interacting with customers and society on social media. Moreover, they build wholly owned links with an emerging house-hold energy production and management sector and prepare for next-gen transport concepts with autonomous driving. This spread of activities is leading to a redefinition of working principles in the sector and potentially even creates new industry structures. It drives on balancing major business risks with major business benefits, that for instance allow to bridge critical, yet non-value adding steps, deliver uncompromised, integrated offerings, and, most importantly, allow for unbiased communication across the business-web about shifts in demands, improvement options, or radical product or production changes, and thereby enabling an agile implementation of a disruptive business strategy.
In agriculture, open innovation takes place in two main clusters and is common between academia, R&D companies and breeders and between academia, farmers, processors and end-product producers. A next step would be to open up such interactions across the value chain, and in addition to include players that are outside the current scope and wish to rethink their sourcing, production and product range from a holistic starting point.
ES: Is the EU using its innovation capacity well, and, if not, what are roadblocks?
MC: The EC published in 2017 a report2 revealing that science in the EU stands at a relatively high level and that this does not show in the output of innovation when compared t