SUSTAINABILITY SPOTLIGHT | 32 EIT Food wanted to get a vision and consensus from across a signi昀椀cant number and diverse range of stakeholders from across Europe on how to make progress in three priority missions: Healthier Lives Through Food; A Net Zero Food System; and Reducing Risk for a Fair & Resilient Food System. IfM Engage provided strategy support in relation to the 昀椀nal two missions in collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast. Andrew Carlin, Director of Missions and Strategic Programmes at EIT Food, highlights the range of insights they were looking to incorporate into their strategy: “We have hundreds of stakeholder organisations across Europe that we wanted to ensure were consulted and involved in how we are funding the future of food. We also wanted to make sure that we were utilising and building on existing insights from academic papers, case studies and subject-matter experts.” workshops, as well as informing the associated reports. Roadmapping was seen by EIT Food as the right Andrew says that the IfM’s help and support in approach for this challenge. Roadmapping is a strategic developing EIT’s thinking and approach to the project planning technique used extensively across industry, became most visible during the in-person workshops in government and academic organisations to bring clarity Paris. to complex problems and alignment of purpose. “The IfM’s very robust roadmapping methodology “I always felt it was possible. The question was getting helped us to turn information into insight. We were ourselves organised to do it. This is where the structure able to sift [through] and contextualise the mass of and the approach that the IfM brought came in. I always information out there to be able to grasp urgency and felt that with the right forum and the right approach, importance and the potential for societal impact. We we would be able to unlock that and move relatively were able to move from the wider picture to a narrower quickly, because the passion was there and the set of priorities and do that in a very structured way expertise was there,” says Andrew. over the course of a couple of days.” Making sense of complexity One of the aspects of IfM’s Engage process that Andrew 昀椀nds particularly valuable is “the element of IfM’s roadmapping process helped to transform the explicitly bringing choices into the strategy setting”. He available data into a manageable number of potential continues: “You’re dealing with a very complex 昀椀eld. projects and programmes that EIT Food could put its The issues can be so big that there’s almost a fear of footprint on. To facilitate this, over 100 people came saying ‘this is more important than that at this point in together in a 2-day roadmapping workshop in Paris. time.” Ahead of the workshops, IfM Engage and Queen’s The process created an environment where people University Belfast worked together with EIT Food could think about preferences and priorities for action. to bring together insights from over 350 academic “We were able to move from ‘this is all too complex, and industry publications, 250 questionnaires, 100 we don’t know where to start,’ to ‘we have to start case studies and 70 in-depth expert interviews. This somewhere and these are the things we need to start pre-work created insights and data that formed a with.” robust foundation for discussions at the roadmapping