Project details

IMPRESA was a 38 months research project implemented between November 2013 and December 2016. It comprises nine participants from Research Institutes, Universities, International Organisations and an SME, from six European countries.

The IMPRESA project:

• describes the contemporary evolution of traditional public and private agricultural research, particularly as its boundaries with food processing, biotechnology and bioeconomy activities (for example, renewable energy) are becoming increasingly blurred, and its objectives are broadening, using on-going structured interaction with an expert stakeholder panel
• surveys the trends, sources and objectives of agricultural research in EU and EEA countries and Switzerland, providing a scoping survey which provides a preliminary view of the range and integration of activities, and to design a framework, compatible with the OECD Frascati manual, to assess the volume and effectiveness of research
• carries out econometric analysis and input-output modelling on the effect of research on agricultural productivity, including lag modelling, as the call specifically requires this, but with a view to acknowledging the importance of additional objectives for research; limited to a small number of country studies, to include small, medium and large countries which also reflect geographic diversity
• in a number of regional case studies, selected for agro-ecological (and possibly also socio-economic) diversity, investigates the overall causal framework of case-specific individual research-based innovations, using active searching for disconfirming evidence as a validation criterion
• innovatively and effectively communicates the results of the major workpackages to national governments and other stakeholders, through a variety of dissemination channels (webinars, policy briefs, as well as traditional reports and conference presentations)

All project documents and results can be found in the project archive.