Advisory Board joins INCREDIBLE for its second General Assembly

In early December, the Italian city of Padova hosted the second General Assembly of the INCREDIBLE project with a two-day meeting to take the pulse of the development of the first year of this initiative.

In addition to analysing the work carried out so far, consortium partners met the Advisory Board, who will advise the experts working on this H2020 project. The composition of the Board is as follows:

• Luccio Brotto (ETIFOR, spin-off from Universidad de Padua)
• Mariana Ferreira (LURESA Resinas, SL)
• Xavier Marcet (Lead to change) 
• Fernando Martínez Peña (Centro de Investigación y Tecnología Agroalimentaria de Aragón, CITA)
• Nicolas Picard (Silva-Mediterranea-FAO)
• Burcu Tunçer (Regional Activity Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production, SPC-RAC)

Innovation, forest policies, green entrepreneurship...

Some Board members had the opportunity to attend several sessions of the assembly, and to get to know the partners involved in the project, as well as their objectives and the tools and methodologies established to achieve them. Mariana Ferreira, Xavier Marcet and Nicolas Picard had a meeting with the project management team, and shared their impressions, their proposals on the establishment of business models for "green entrepreneurship" and the connection of investors with the industry, among other aspects.

This meeting also produced a rich exchange of perceptions on the sectoral policies developed by public administrations, open innovation, building opportunities and support for entrepreneurship. As ever, there is a clear need to network, share knowledge and establish development models and replicable business for NWFPs. Subsequently, some of these impressions were transferred to the plenary session with all those attending the general assembly. (Visit here the images of the meeting)

INCREDIBLE photo contest

The experience contributed by these professionals of long and recognised trajectory opened an afternoon that, as a counterpoint, ended with the vision of some of the younger actors in the world of non-wood forest products and their value chains. ETIFOR (spin off from the Padova University and member of the INCREDIBLE project) presented the result of the contest aimed at university students and young researchers, which had the challenge of narrating, with a brief text and up to three photographs, the value chain of a NWFP. Twenty participants made their contributions, with beautiful images, resulting in winners Lorenzo Girelli (first prize), Caterina Volpe (second prize) and Riccardo Minto (third prize).

Wild Mushrooms & Truffles iNet Interregional Workshop

Taking advantage of the gathering of partners for the general assembly, an inter-regional workshop for the innovation network (iNet) of Wild Mushorooms & Truffles was held on 5 and 6 December at Padova University.  Representatives from Croatia, France, Greece, Italy and Spain compared notes on taxation and regulation of wild mushrooms and truffles in an interregional workshop that called for urgent policy change at European scale. A second day was spent in the field, to learn about the peculiarities and habitat of the white truffle (Tuber magnatum) producer, emblem of the region.