Food companies invited to collaborate on plant-based research
Plant2Food is an Open Innovation in Science platform based on patent-free and open research in which universities and companies collaborate to solve complex challenges
The Novo Nordisk Foundation is supporting the platform with up to €27m over the next five years.
The move is because the Novo Nordisk Foundation has recognised that it is necessary to convert a big part of food production to plant-based foods in order to make the most appropriate use of agricultural land as well as being able to feed a growing world population.
Collaboration
The new collaboration platform, Plant2Food, has been launched as a hub for researchers and companies to collaborate to solve some of the complex issues of developing plant-based foods. The platform is based on open collaboration, which means that the knowledge created through the platform becomes available to everyone. The aim is to accelerate the overall development of new plant-based foods and to optimise collaboration across the various sectors within plant and food science.
“We need to rapidly develop foods that can feed a growing world population without over-utilising the planet’s resources,” said Claus Felby, senior vice president of Biotech at the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Universities and companies joining the platform agree to publish all results from the open research projects and waive any claim to intellectual property rights.
Accelerate products
This will enable researchers and companies to co-develop project ideas and to accelerate projects faster by starting them immediately when a research group and a company agree to explore an idea. The open approach also gives everyone the opportunity to further develop the results and potentially use them for commercial purposes.
“This task is too complex for a single research group or company to solve alone. In Plant2Food, we want to crunch the value chain so that both researchers and companies can derive input from unexpected sources and thereby create solutions that would otherwise not be readily available,” said Marie Louise Conradsen, head of Open Innovation in Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Faculty of Technical Sciences at Aarhus University, which is hosting Plant2Food.
Plant2Food will also focus on developing basic knowledge about the properties of crops and how they can be used in food products.
