Bio-Districts, Living Labs and Digital Innovation: The Greece–Italy Project Building Tomorrow’s Sustainable Territories
18 May 2026InnoPolis Takes the Stage at the RGC Conference: Presenting the BIO-DISTRICT APP
On 20 May 2026, InnoPolis proudly represented its work at the Regional Development Conference (RGC) at the University of Patras, presenting the BIO-DISTRICT APP — a groundbreaking Interreg project bridging organic farming, digital innovation, and cross-border collaboration between Greece and Italy.
Katerina Sotiropoulou, President of InnoPolis — Centre for Innovation & Culture, delivered a comprehensive presentation to an audience of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and stakeholders from across the region. The session offered a deep dive into both the vision and the concrete outcomes of the BIO-DISTRICT APP project, highlighting InnoPolis’s central role in its development and dissemination.
Europe’s Agricultural Challenge — and Our Answer
The presentation opened by framing the urgent context: European agriculture faces a convergence of pressures that demand innovative, collaborative responses.
Climate Change
Extreme weather, drought, and soil degradation threaten the viability of organic farming across the continent.
Economic Pressure
Rural communities face declining incomes, land abandonment, and fragmented markets with little digital support.
Governance Gaps
Multi-stakeholder coordination across regions, sectors, and borders remains a persistent challenge.
Digital Divide
Agriculture lags behind in digital transformation, with limited tools designed specifically for the organic sector.
The BIO-DISTRICT APP project was conceived precisely to address these challenges — combining the bio-district governance model with Living Lab methodology and a state-of-the-art digital platform.
What is the BIO-DISTRICT APP?
A Bio-District is a defined territory where farmers, citizens, public authorities, and food and tourism operators sign a formal agreement to manage local resources according to organic principles. The BIO-DISTRICT APP project takes this concept further by developing a multilingual cross-border digital platform to connect and empower all stakeholders involved.
Co-funded by the Interreg VI-A Greece–Italy 2021–2027 programme, the project runs for 24 months (June 2025 – June 2027) and brings together six partners from Greece and Italy, targeting bio-districts in Apulia (Biodistretto delle Lame) and Western Greece (Municipality of Ancient Olympia).
The Power of Living Labs
A central pillar of the project — and a key focus of the presentation — is the Living Lab methodology. Rather than designing digital tools in isolation, the project co-creates solutions with the very communities that will use them, following a five-stage iterative process: stakeholder engagement, needs assessment, co-design sessions, prototype testing, and pilot validation.
InnoPolis leads the Living Lab of Western Greece, based in the Municipality of Ancient Olympia, working directly with local organic producers and agritourism stakeholders to ensure the digital platform responds to real, on-the-ground needs.
InnoPolis’s Role and Contribution
Far from being a peripheral partner, InnoPolis plays a strategic and hands-on role across the project:
- Lead of Work Package 2 (Communication & Dissemination) — overseeing the project’s entire communication strategy, web presence, and outreach.
- Coordination of the Western Greece Living Lab — engaging local stakeholders in the Municipality of Ancient Olympia in participatory co-design.
- Digital Co-Design Contribution — shaping platform services through participatory workshops and stakeholder feedback loops.
- Capacity Building — developing skills and knowledge for farmers, local authorities, and civil society organisations.
- Organic Farming Ecosystem Expertise — drawing on previous ENICBC 2014–2020 experience in organic farming digitalisation..
The presentation concluded with an inspiring vision for the future — one that extends well beyond the project’s lifetime. The platform is designed to be open, scalable, and replicable, with a roadmap that includes:
A Mediterranean bio-district network · Open-source platform publication · Integration with national agri-digital systems · Replication across new Interreg regions · Policy engagement at European level.
From Living Labs to a Mediterranean network of bio-districts — this project is a blueprint for how innovation, technology, and community can come together to build a more sustainable and resilient Europe.
The RGC Conference provided an ideal platform to share these outcomes with a wide audience, reaffirming InnoPolis’s commitment to making the results of publicly funded projects visible, accessible, and impactful — in line with the project’s “public” deliverable status under the grant agreement.
The BIO-DISTRICT APP project is co-funded by the European Union under the Interreg VI-A Greece–Italy 2021–2027 programme. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Managing Authority.
