The project represents an excellent and crucial opportunity to concentrate all resources from national and European funding, in order to build a Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Agricultural Sciences, which is unifying all national top level research capacities ready to interact with and contribute to the European Research Area. The strong belief in the success of the future centre of excellence SLO-ACE comes from the fact that the project has been designed in answer to an existing need well perceived in Slovenia in the recent years, and acknowledged and supported by the governmental institutions in the country.
Slovenia is small country at the crossroads of three very different climatic zones (Mediterranean, Alpine and Pannonian) and can, therefore, serve as a large-scale field laboratory for research of the influence of climatic changes on agricultural production in several very different environments, which can be than applied to other countries of the region and further. KIS and its partners in the SLO-ACE have the field research facilities that cover most of those environments and perform research as needed. The implementation of the research results into practice (TRL 6-9) can be achieved in cooperation with different stakeholders through the Strategic Development Innovation Partnerships platforms of Smart Specialisation of Slovenia.
All strategic documents in Slovenia include agriculture. Sustainable food production is now the basic pillar of Slovenian national strategies together with Ecology. Out of eight priorities in the Slovene RIS3, Agriculture and food production are the only ones for which there is no center of excellence yet in Slovenia.
Slovenia, as many other Eastern and Central Europe countries faces the lack of financial and human resources, the underdeveloped research infrastructure, the dispersed RTD capacities between different research units in the country as a whole. If the research capacity in the country is conditionally divided into three main groups: universities which should be providing higher education and basic research, institutes which are supposed to perform basic and applied research and Advisory services, which are responsible for knowledge transfer, the actual situation demonstrates unnatural competition for the same funds between different groups which face a weak financial situation for R&D in the country. For calls at the national level, all these parties are competing, despite the fact that there is a need for collaboration to produce the best research results. SLO-ACE aims to solve this difficulty.
The overall objective is to establish and develop a Slovenian Center of Excellence for Agricultural Sciences (SLO-ACE) as a joint initiative of Agricultural Institute of Slovenia (KIS) and world-class research institutes INRA from France and Aarhus University from Denmark with the support of five prominent Slovenian institutions.
