Organisation and governance

Plant2Food is an international platform governed by a Steering Group and administrated by a Secretariat based at the Open Innovation in Science office at Aarhus University.

Below the diagram, you can read more about the different bodies.

Steering Group

The Steering Groups sets the overall strategic direction of Plant2Food and decides which projects to fund.

Plant2Food's Steering Groups consists of high-level members from each of the 4 partner universities and the three core industry partners. Furthermore, the Steering Group also includes a representative from FBCD (see below) and a representative from an NGO.

The Review Committee

The Review Committee consists of members from both academia and industry with relevant research expertise. The Commitees role is to assess the incoming applicatings and forward the top 50-75% of applications to the Specialist Review Pool. Following the Specialist reviews, the Committee nominates projects for funding to the Steering Group.
The Committee also assess deviations in project plans, when requested by the Plant2Food secretariat.

Specialist Review Pool

The Specialist Review Pool consists of 30-40 international experts appointed by the Review Committe. Together they represent different scientific fields and industrial value chains.

Each of the top 50-75% of the applications are reviewed by members of the Specialist Review Pool.

Secretariat

The Plant2Food Secretariat consists of a Programme Manager and an Administrative Coordinator based at Aarhus University.

The secretariat is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Plant2Food project. 

Programme Manager - responsibilities:

  • Facilitating ideation, matchmaking and knowledge-sharing events in Plant2Food
  • Implementation of competitive funding calls for projects
  • Collecting and assessing progress reports from funded P2F projects
  • Stakeholder engagement and recruitment
  • Coordination of open access and knowledge dissemination activities in P2F

Administrative Coordinator - responsibilities:

  • Administrative coordination of the Plant2Food platform
  • Organization of both online and physical events
  • Communication and graphics
  • Development of the Plant2Food platform

Ambassadors

To ensure fast and agile ideation andmatchmaking in Plant2Food, a number of ambassadors are engaged in both industry and academia.

Scientific ambassadors

The scientific ambassadors are active scientists at the partnering universities (AU, DTU, UCPH, and WUR) with an overview of research areas, colleagues and companies who may be relevant to connect for developing new research ideas that can emerge through the Plant2Food ideation process. By activating ambassador networks – and similar (unfunded) networks in industry – the Programme Manager can quickly help the author of an idea in Plant2Food source relevant partners and input across many organisations.

Industry ambassadors

Plant2Food will draw on a network of industry representatives from any interested, committed companies to assess incoming ideas on the Plant2Food ideation and matchmaking platform and accelerate the match between ideas and relevant partners within the often large companies. In this way, the ambassadors can quickly screen ideas from academia or other companies at meetings with the Secretariat, discuss their potential, and engage the right recipients within their organisation.

The Food & Bio Cluster Denmark (FBCD).

FBCD will support the secretariat on a consultancy level with a FTE.

Food & Bio Cluster Denmark (FBCD) is the national cluster organisation for food and bio resources. The organisation has 400+ members across the Danish food and bioindustry and drives activities for all types of companies, entrepreneurs, knowledge institutions and GTS’s.

FBCD promotes collaboration and networking between companies, researchers and other stakeholders within the sector and provides information and services to help companies drive and optimize their innovation capacity.

Food & Bio Cluster Denmark will, among other things, help the Secretariat:

  • Recruit companies and the best projects
  • Tailor Plant2Food’s value proposition to individual company types
  • Communicate the results of Plant2Food to a wide range of companies