Co-Creation in Agrifood and Bio-Based Innovation: Accelerating Trust and Impact
As a sector, agrifood biotech has enormous potential to improve the sustainability, resilience, and productivity of our food systems. Yet many promising innovations still fail to reach the market, often because they are not sufficiently aligned with real-world needs or adoption barriers. The B-Trust project aims to involve end-users from the start, to help make agrifood R&D more relevant, equitable, and impactful.
Many biotech innovations stall before reaching the market, often becoming trapped in so-called ‘valleys of death’. While European initiatives and funding schemes have largely addressed the first valley — the gap between academic discovery and a working prototype — a second, deeper valley remains between functioning concept and commercial scale.
In this second valley of death, the bottleneck is created by the capital-intensive scale-up requirements, slow and fragmented regulation, and challenges in industrial adoption. Misalignment with the needs of real-world users significantly contributes to that final hurdle. Too often, research agendas are shaped exclusively by experts, leaving end-users and their valuable lived experience out of the equation until they’re being sold a product.