April 5, 2017

Content sponsored by Ohad Zuckerman, Managing Partner, Copia Agro & Food Ltd.

Humanity is facing three intense challenges due to a booming world population and its intense industrial progress:

• – Food Security (i.e. food shortage, food waste, and food allocation)
• – Climate Change that forces food production in extreme conditions
• – Negative effects of agriculture on the environment

To address these challenges, the agricultural upstream portion of the food chain should align and combine breeding and crop protection practices. Seed breeding companies should concentrate their efforts toward breeding varieties with higher yield, enhanced health benefits, and longer shelf-life, as well as resistance to diseases and a-biotic stresses.

Crop protection companies should look for biological and environmentally-friendly solutions instead of hazardous chemicals when enhancing plant ability to resist diseases and pests. New technologies and products in harmony with nature should replace technologies and products that have negative effects on the environment. In addition to the combined effort of breeding and crop protection companies, sustainable renewable energy and biological raw-materials and products should be promoted. By doing so, we can meet all three challenges.

Who is responsible for leading these efforts?

It is the responsibility of governments, corporations, and academia to join forces in this task.

Humanity needs to understand the urgency to act quickly and rigorously by investing for the long-term and creating a change, otherwise the situation will become worse. Unfortunately, necessary measures are being taken too slowly, and sustainable products and services that mitigate the challenges we face (and which we created!) are not yet the standard.

Governments should be proactive by creating sustainability-focused laws, regulations, and financing.

Organizations should set innovation as one of their pillar values. Innovation, however, is not a target; it is a means to propel change and improvement. It is a profitable implementation of ideas. This is a call upon all CEOs to combine their managerial and leadership skills to ensure that innovation is part of their corporate vision, mission statement, and strategies, and that innovation is embedded in their organizational culture. This can be achieved by recruiting high quality persons with complementary capabilities; by enhancing managerial practices such as flat organizations, empowerment, rewarding for success, and not punishing for mistakes; by creating innovation-oriented task groups; by allocating resources for suitable technologies; by maintaining close relationships and communication with customers and suppliers; and even by the designing of corporate offices.

And Academia? As difficult it is to find organizations with innovation as part of their DNA, innovation is easily found in research institutes and universities. Academia is packed with human curiosity, without the economic pressure of commercial companies. Thus, scientists are able to think outside the box to find innovative solutions.

The simple solution for fostering innovation within organizations should therefore be collaboration between industry and academia. Such collaboration may enable organizations to progress and academic research to focus on real market needs. However, this avenue is not as smooth as it sounds. The commercialization ratio of technologies originating in academia is relatively low. Academics and Industrialists simply have different mindsets. Companies can be risk-averse, have short-term goals, and invest only in proven solutions, whereas academic research is long-term and risky. Moreover, scientists are incentivized by publication of papers in scientific magazines and not by invention of viable solutions which can be implemented in industry.

Therefore, it is our generation’s duty to create and implement models that bridge this communication gap between industry and academia. This can begin by a shared process between scientists and a corporate marketing and development team to compose a clear and detailed product profile and set goals with measurable objectives. By aligning work plans, timetables, milestones, and a budget, a joint terminology is created and the gaps are minimized.

This is the quest of Copia Agro & Food, an Israeli VC fund launched in 2014. The fund invests in technological projects within research institutes and leads their transition from proof-of-concept into commercial products by hands-on involvement and by cooperation with prominent industrial partners.