PR - Agri-food Living Lab: The Virtual Meeting Place For Open Innovation On Farm Information Management And Ict Development (p496-504)

Information exchange is a crucial factor in modern farm management, especially when the whole agri-food supply chain network is taken into account. This requires flexible information systems for which a common digital infrastructure is needed. Development of such an infrastructure is, technically and organizationally seen, a huge challenge. In this paper an open innovation approach called Agri-Food Living Lab is presented as an appropriate vehicle to support and conduct this development. In living labs, users and developers are co-operating in an open space to develop innovative ideas. Each player can use innovations, derived from this open space, to develop private or commercial applications. In this way, development of innovations is expected to be accelerated and based on a common investment in a digital infrastructure. The Agri-Food Living Lab is a community of practitioners tightly connected with a web portal functioning as a virtual meeting place and providing a structure and components that support information systems development. Current results show that use cases play a central role, while methodology components such as web services and reference process models are used to create coherence in the gradually developed infrastructure. A key success factor, which is currently not fulfilled, is creation of enough critical mass to boost the development and to create self-enhancement. To improve this, several actions concerning communication and stakeholder involvement are taking place and extensions are planned through connections with similar international platforms.