Peer-To-Peer learning:  accessing innovation through demonstration
The PLAID project (Peer-to-peer Learning:  Accessing Innovation through Demonstration) will identify, compile and make publically accessible the topics, locations, best practices and innovative approaches to demonstration on commercial farms in the EU 28, Switzerland and Norway.   PLAID will enable access to demonstration activities by creating a searchable georeferenced inventory and map covering all 30 countries; developing ‘virtual’ (on-line) demonstration approaches with commercial farmers; assessing governance, commissioning, financing, topic selection, access (particularly gender), mediation techniques and impact in 24 longitudinal case studies; and comparing the impact of different governance models and financing mechanisms on learning processes and accessibility.  PLAID will produce recommendations for governance and best practice in both real and virtual demonstration settings, using these to develop indicators and decision support tools for farmers, advisors, commercial companies, charities, educators, policy makers and researchers.  PLAID is a multi-actor consortium, using a multi-stakeholder approach, where farmers, industry stakeholders and academics work together as to design, test and validate outputs. PLAID has been designed to achieve high impact, through generation of a substantial set of knowledge exchange activities and project outputs, which will be hosted long-term on PLAID stakeholder web-sites, You Tube and the EIP Agri Service Point. PLAID will initiate a community of practice, which together with the above activities and outputs will provide a solid foundation for RUR-12-2017: “Networking European farms to boost thematic knowledge exchanges and close the innovation gap” and provide substantive input to the EIP Agri database.