The network

The network promotes cooperation between private and public organisations from the scientific, business and administrative sectors with the goal of removing obstacles between companies, production stages and national borders, thus improving the quality and optimising the processes of the participating organisations.

Main activities

For the innovation efforts of the agricultural and food industry, enterprise limits, production stages, and national boundaries represent hurdles for transparency, quality improvement, and process optimisation. Questions arise for research and development actors, the answers to which are more easily found within a network of organisations from the commercial, scientific and administrative fields. Primarily, in order to be able to ensure as efficient a network as possible, it is necessary to strengthen the seams between the above-mentioned levels with the help of modern information and communication models.
Without the moderation and distributed coordination of GIQS, the development of sector-specific systems by each individual partner would be financially and organisationally infeasible.
GIQS, as an open platform, offers private and public organisations the chance to participate in reaching milestones on the way to more innovation in the agro business. Planning, initiating and carrying out research projects is a GIQS core task along with knowledge transfer within the agricultural and food industry.

The technological focus

The technological focus of the GIQS competence network is concentrated on developing information and communication technologies suited for application in inter-enterprise quality, health, and crisis management in the agri-food sector. Potential user groups, data warehouses and interdisciplinary research groups jointly develop information and communication models. In the process, existing models are adapted to the requirements of the market. The private enterprise network partners are involved in the development process, ensuring that the requirements set by the producing, processing and acting stage of the value creation chain are taken into consideration as well as the technical realisation possibilities (by the software developers). Testing of models takes place in the daily business routine. During these pilot activities, the developments are validated and improved.

Highlights

The GIQS network is active regionally, nationally, and internationally. Its goal is to unite companies, administration and/or scientific institutions of the agricultural and food sector in the German-Dutch border area and beyond in clusters in order to better be able to use synergy effects.
An increasing number of cooperation partners and a continuously broadening field of research activities speak for the suitability of this strategy.
The increasing internationalisation of the existing network offers members extended access to know-how of both scientific and economic nature.
For its innovative role in the transfer of knowledge between science and commerce, GIQS received the North Rhine-Westphalia Food Processing Cooperation Award in December 2002. GIQS has established itself as a permanent institution in joint research and development in the agricultural and food industry.