The holidays are near and well deserved considering all the trouble of this first part of 2020, but despite the summer breaks the SPARKLE partners are keeping on working hard on the last stages of the project. In this article we want to give you some updates about what has been done and what is expected by the end of the project.
After the intense phase devoted to the creation of the course and its materials (WP3), SPARKLE partners are now focused on WP4 and WP5 activities, respectively the pilot test of the course, where a Pilot Action Plan to start the educations packages on each country was created, and the planning of the Business model competition and the intrapreneurship experience.
At the moment being, all Pilot Actions in each partner country have been carried out and UPM has collected the feedback concerning them in a document that analyses all the data and suggestions provided by participants in questionnaires along with the grade results tables of the Pilot Actions. This report is a continuation of the common pilot action plan that was released on February 25th, 2020.
Furthermore, Agrosap – as WP5 Leader – has been provided with the needed documents for the Call for challenges and is preparing the Business challenges collection. Thanks to its expertise in the PA sector and its role as a “bridge” between Academia and Business, Agrosap supported the partners to launch an open “call for challenges” addressed to traditional farmers. The main aim of this activity is to collect potential business cases for allowing the students who participated in the training course to put into practice the knowledge acquired.
In these weeks the partners are also dealing with the organization of the Business Model Competition that will be implemented in September and October. The Universities will present the BMC challenges to the students by the beginning of September, while the intrapreneurial experience for the winning team of the competition is scheduled to take place in mid-October. Finally, by the end of October, the open-access Moodle platform containing all the training materials will be online for all the people interested in learning more about Sustainable Precision Agriculture.
Stay tuned!