AgriFoodBoost –  Boosting Excellence in Experimental Research for Agri-Food Economics and Management

Funding scheme: H2020 – TWINNING

Start date: 01/10/2020
Duration: 36 months
Overall budget: 899. 315,00 €
Coordinator: University of Zagreb Faculty of Agriculture

Project leader: Marija Cerjak, PhD

The main aim of the project is to improve research excellence and scientific visibility of agri-food economics at the Faculty of Agriculture in Zagreb (FAZ). The project, designed in partnership with University of Bologna, Agricultural University of Athens and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences focuses on the use of experimental economics applied to agriculture, food and environment. AgriFoodBoost twinning will enhance scientific, innovation and academic capacities of FAZ researchers in order to become competitive on the scientific market, but also to offer new expertise to agri-food business sector.  The project will assist in improving faculty-industry networking by establishing a research HUB for experimental economics, enabling FAZ to become a regionally leading Centre for experimental agri-food economics and management.

The general and specific objectives of the project are:

General objectives:

  • to enhance the scientific excellence and technological capacity of the Faculty of Agriculture in Zagreb (FAZ) in experimental research for agri-food economics and management
  • to raise the research profile of FAZ and its scientists by increasing their knowledge and expanding their research capacity regarding economic experiments and decision-making in the agri-food sector that can be translated into effective and efficient practice
  • to address the existing networking gap by increasing the exchange of knowledge and expanding collaboration among partner institutions and researchers who are familiar with challenges in the use of experimental economics in agri-food sector.

Specific objectives:

  • To upgrade and intensify scientific research of FAZ researchers by using modern/recent methodological achievements in the field of experimental economics in the agri-food sector. This will be enabled by knowledge transfer from internationally-leading EU institutions through innovative training activities such as experts visits, summer schools, workshops.
  • To foster integration of FAZ and their researchers into the European Research Area (ERA) by increasing our scientific visibility (e.g. publications, presentations at conferences) and communication (e.g. participation in open events) as well as by expanding our international collaboration ending with submitting grant applications (such as H2020)
  • To boost scientific capacity of early stage researchers in order to ensure sustainability of the research group
  • To improve university-industry collaboration to ensure double-directional flow of information between research and practice and to integrate experimental economy in agri-food sector in Croatia
  • To strengthen the research management and administration skills in order to improve FAZ proposal preparation and project management/administration skills
  • To identify and prioritize follow-up strategy for using gained knowledge, but also for extending the insights gained during the project implementation.