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Field Report from the Food Innovation Program
Miriam Lueck Avery and I were recently in Italy to launch the Food Innovation Program, a first-of-its-kind masters degree co-founded by our Food Futures Lab, the Future Food Institute, and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE). The whole program is based on IFTF’s Seeds of Disruption forecast map, with course modules on eating, production, distribution, manufacturing, and shopping. Foresight and design thinking are the introductory modules, readying the students for ten months of diverse lectures, design challenges from companies, exhibit design at the Milano EXPO, and startup creation.
The 18 students hail from ten countries—including Canada, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Italy, and Egypt—and have backgrounds ranging from literature to agronomy to clinical nutrition. During the first week of classes, Miriam led the students through every part of the Seeds of Disruption map, surfacing frequently for activities drawn from our Foresight Practitioner Workshops to help the students create a “second curve of food”, with local signals from around the world. We also shared our Systems Mythology Toolkit as a design tool to help the students create living artifacts from the future—mash-ups of prototyping and improv—imagining futuristic kitchens for overwhelmed families, restaurants for the elderly, and seasteading cooperative farms.
The program’s kick-off with IFTF set the tone for the ten-month journey to become food innovators: the students see the big picture, feel empowered to make the future, and have come together as a group that can work collaboratively to clarify their visions and make them tangible.
Meet the students and watch them in action during their IFTF foresight week:
Following the foresight week with Miriam, the students will work with renowned experts and professors, including:
- Claude Fischler, head of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Anthropology and director of research for the French National Center for Scientific Research
- Caleb Harper, Founder of the MIT Media Lab’s CityFARM
- Jeffrey Lipton from Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab and Seraph Robotics
- Daniela Barile from the UC Davis Foods for Health Institute
- Thomas Reardon from University of Michigan’s Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics
- Michael Bourlakis, head of Cranfield University's Supply Chain Research Center
- Kithi Kalyanam from Santa Clara University’s Retail Management Institute
- and a robust group of professors from across UNIMORE.
While we shared IFTF’s foresight methods in the classroom, right outside a kitchen-makerspace, the Officucina ("workshop-kitchen"), rose from a hole in the ground to an inspiring container structure. Designed by architect and Fab Lab Reggio Emilia founder, Francesco Bombardi, the Officucina blends tradition and innovation in the center of Reggio Emilia. Filled with commercial kitchen equipment—and soon laser cutters, food-grade 3D printers, Arduino, DQuid, and surprising tech like pit-drills donated by Formula One—the Officucina is already a living lab for the students. Last week, they cooked alongside local chef Marta Scalabrini of Marta in Cucina to reinvent traditional dishes using the tools of molecular gastronomy.
Our Food Futures Lab on the frontier of making the future of food with this program, the only food studies program focused on foresight and making the future. We’re honored to collaborate with UNIMORE's Matteo Vignoli and Sara Roversi from the Future Food Institute, a passion project from the heart of Bologna’s entrepreneurial community, to include long-term futures thinking and foresight methodologies alongside innovation and consideration of food culture. The Food Innovation Program: On the Road events series will take these projects and conversations about the future of food to communities around the region.
Exploring Emilia-Romagna as a food innovation region
The Food Innovation Program is only one part of the forces shaping the future of food in Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most important culinary and agricultural regions. 41 of the country’s 200 geographically-protected foods come from this region, which is also home to some of Europe’s largest food companies, the European Food Safety Authority, major universities, and leading technology companies like DQuid and Ferrari.
For this reason, our Food Futures Lab is researching innovation in Emilia-Romagna in 2015, the launch of our multi-year study of food innovation epicenters around the world. How does the critical intersection of technology, the agrifood sector, and culture shape the future of food in this region? What resource constraints does Emilia-Romagna face? What are the drivers and impacts of innovation, and what do they teach us about innovation in other regions around the world?
We want you to join us! Contact Dawn Alva ([email protected]) to join our research immersion to the Expo Milano and Reggio Emilia, June 24-25, 2015.
For more information
- Contact Rebecca Chesney ([email protected]) for more about IFTF and the Food Innovation Program.
- See our 2015 Food Futures Lab research agenda and contact Dawn Alva ([email protected]) to become a member.
- Follow @iftf and @foodinpro on Twitter, and visit the Food Innovation Program Facebook page.
- Check the Food Innovation Program: On the Road calendar to join events around Emilia-Romagna and at the Expo Milano.
All photos and videos by Karabo Mooki for the Food Innovation Program.
This post is part of IFTF’s Food Futures Lab, which identifies and catalyzes the innovations that have the potential to reinvent our global food system. We seek to understand the motivations, drivers, and impacts of food innovation, and to align the minds and resources shaping the future of food. We impart a shared understanding of how to take the long-term view—one that encompasses multiple scales, uncertainties, and radically different possibilities for the future of food. We develop foresight and insight that help all eaters take action toward a more resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food.