The Network

The energy, agroecological and food transitions are generating an immense need for innovation in the fields of agriculture, the environment, biomass processing and product consumption. 

Creating varietal and specific mixtures, supporting the exploration of new farming practices, combining crop systems and their landscape mosaic within catchment areas, managing farming waste and food waste to close the loop, developing new plant protein-based products, and analysing coupled innovations by agricultural and processing actors: these are just a few of the avenues explored by IDEAS scientists with socio-economic partners, thanks to the open, innovative and distributed design approaches developed within the network.

IDEAS, created at the initiative of INRAE and AgroParisTech in 2016, structures a dynamic articulation of research, training and support, and enables academic and socio-economic partners to share ideas and work together to: (i) produce knowledge on approaches to and forms of organization of design processes to support transitions towards more sustainable agri-food systems; (ii) implement and organize open and participatory design approaches, with academic and socio-economic partners, to foster disruptive and systemic innovations (simultaneously creating new products, technologies and services, as well as their markets and uses); and (iii) highlight the scientific knowledge that these design processes allow within the disciplines involved in the network.