Kolba Lab is calling entrepreneurs, individual innovators, SMEs, NGOS, start-up teams, researchers and everyone in the network to submit their ideas in response to Future of Agriculture and Food Processing Innovation Challenge!

We are looking for future-driven ideas on design and development of products and services addressing major challenges identified back in 2019 during future research on agriculture and food processing in Tavush and Gegharkunik regions. The following possible directions have been spotlighted by the participatory foresight exercise:

  • Drones in agriculture (fertilization by drone, drone programmers and control specialists)
  • Alternative greenhouses
  • Optimised logistics in agriculture
  • Data collection and analysis in agriculture
  • Blockchain technologies in agriculture
  • Urban farming
  • Digital farming
  • Food safety
  • Winemaking
  • Smart drip irrigation systems

The global community has set itself the goal to end hunger by 2030. To achieve this, agriculture must become more efficient and sustainable along the entire value chain. Due to COVID-19 many existing challenges in food security, food safety, food waste, and agricultural production accelerated and need to be addressed in new rapid ways. Current approaches are not sufficient to achieve this. That’s why we are not looking for traditional ideas from agriculture but rather encourage applications on the edge of cross-sectoral collaboration and creativity. The transfer of knowledge from research into farming practices has proven to be slow and difficult globally, however, we reward bold ideas on the use of new technologies, alternative approaches, and digital solutions with the potential to improve production, efficiency, the profitability of agriculture and food processing industry. For instance, we are looking for solutions that might help farmers to view the data across their entire farm enabling them to make the data-driven decisions to improve performance and profitability.

If you have an idea that could address one of these big issues or if you are already working on these issues and you would like to increase your impact, Kolba would love to work with you. We expect to receive start-up ideas, which can be prototyped and tested within the upcoming 6 months. For this, we will help you to incubate your idea into a viable project with professional mentorship and guidance, following with seed funding of $3000-$5000.

Submit your idea using this online form. The deadline for submissions is extended until July 27th.

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