Professor Janet Dwyer and Dr Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins secured funding from Horizon Europe for a four-year collaborative project aimed at improving knowledge exchange between rural businesses and communities across Europe. The work will complement CCRI’s already strong research role in the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE) in England.
The team is looking at how businesses and communities can innovate, exploring new approaches to sourcing and analysing rural information and data, with a view to aiding planning, while considering the opportunities and challenges of climate change, demographic shifts and digitalisation.
Janet Dwyer, Professor of Rural Policy, said: “We are delighted to have secured funding from the Horizon Europe programme for RUSTIK to help support the research we are carrying out jointly with our partners in Europe.
“We will be working with Gloucestershire Rural Community Council and Monmouthshire County Council as partners among a suite of 14 ‘Living Labs’ across Europe, researching rural diversity and societal transformations.
“Our fieldwork in the UK will be linked to a network of other sites across Europe providing opportunities to experiment and share ideas, and generate lessons and recommendations for practice and for policy. This will help to improve access to better quality rural information for businesses and communities.”
The full consortium involves 31 partners and is led by the Institute for Rural Development Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Colleagues involved include Professor Janet Dwyer, Dr Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins, Katarina Kubinakova and Aimee Morse.
For an explanation of how living labs work and deliver results as exemplified by a previous project, you might like to see this CCRI Seminar.
This project is part of the Horizon Europe project 101061051. This work is supported by Innovate UK through the Horizon Europe Guarantee scheme [grant number 10041384]”.
CCRI Ref: 2021-016
