Organisation profile
Organisation profile
Empower Eco™ is a multi-actor interdisciplinary quadruple helix HUB that connects key stakeholders (academia, industry, government, society) to advance solutions for complex societal challenges with a focus on agri-food, the environment, bioeconomy and climate change. It also embraces cross cutting activities with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) with the discipline of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) to address these top-down policy challenges from a bottom up operational perspective. Central to Empower Eco™ is to support and enable companies and entrepreneurs through bespoke training, testing, piloting and scaling of new innovations at (TRL 6 and beyond) to realize new Green Deal opportunities. Empower Eco™ is embedded in important strategic initiatives including the Midlands Regional Development Plan 2024 to support and drive regional job creation. It’s operation is to inform and advance beyond-state-of-the-art solutions to pressing societal challenges using a holistic stakeholder approach underpinned by defining, applying and developing key performance indicators (KPIs) with stakeholders. Empower Eco™ also supports early-phase ideation (early TRLs) and for de-risking of complex projects through the use of appropriate business models that includes co-development of environmental models beyond typical life cycle assessment (LCA) monitoring tools.
Empower Eco™ platform is managed by Professor Neil Rowan who has 3 decades of experience of delivering solutions in these areas through appropriate collaborations with partnering academic institutions (RPOs), industry, policymakers and communities. These collaborative activities include linkages to relevant national (such as EPA, DAFM) and international (such as Interreg, Marie Sklodowski Curie [MSCA] RISE and international training networks; Erasmus plus, Cost Actions, and Regional University Network – European University [RUN-EU]) funded projects for open knowledge and technology exchanges that also includes important staff mobility and specialist ‘subject-matter’ training. Central to the success of Empower Eco™ is the seamless integration of sophisticated “living labs” with in field monitoring and development for new products and services linked to education, entrepreneurship and industry.
Our plan is to develop and inspirational Empower Eco™ innovation HUB/living lab complex for enterprise development, innovation in biodiversity and circular economy, community regeneration, social innovation tacking societal challenges, all underpinned by education, learning and entrepreneurship. This will mobilize the next generation of innovators, leaders, entrepreneurs, learners and communities to stimulate regional job creation and environmental knowledge base with a global orientation with a strong nexus to education. Empower Eco™ will also help unlock important opportunities for the midlands Just Transition territory through a holistic approach to addressing key issues for end-users.
Principal Investigator: Prof Neil Rowan