Inspire - Targeted Nutrition

Objectives

As a learner, you will develop your knowledge about the nutritional needs of specific populations and how they differ from the general population. These will include infants, children, adolescents, or older adults. These groups will be targeted as they are those most at risk of nutritional deficiency or overnutrition, which can have implications for the development of non-communicable diseases and life-long ill health.

You will apply your knowledge of nutrition to innovate a new product for a specific target group.

Entry Requirements

We are seeking undergraduates, Masters students, PhD students, Postdoctoral researchers, young professionals or aspiring entrepreneurs interested in transforming the food system and improving the lives of specific segments of the population. We are interested in individuals from multidisciplinary backgrounds to work in teams to come up with innovative ideas, e.g. Food Science, Other Sciences, Engineering, Business/ Marketing, Informatics and Computational Science, among others.

Advantages

Integrating entrepreneurship training with food system innovation will enable you to create solutions to global challenges such as climate change and health.

The programme has been developed, and will be delivered by an outstanding collaborative group composed of European universities, institutes and food industry companies. This unique programme features teaching by highly skilled mentors in entrepreneurship in the food system from the University of Reading (UK), Aarhus University (Denmark), Basque Culinary Center (Spain) and the Spanish food cooperative group Grupo AN.

The programme is augmented by world-class specific entrepreneurship teaching, which will be delivered by a team from the University of Cambridge (UK), Technion University (Israel) and Aarhus University. This programme combines academia and industry to enable you to innovate and develop exciting new food concepts for specific target groups.

You will work in interdisciplinary teams with personal mentoring/ coaching by experts from the universities, institutes, start-ups and companies throughout the 3 weeks of the programme. Your team will finally receive feedback on your ideas after pitching them in front of an expert jury.

The course amounts to 5 ECTS. However, it depends on respective universities if they accept it into the study programme of students.

Career Opportunities

Training in entrepreneurship and innovation in targeted nutrition can create career opportunities for you as a university student, early career researcher and young entrepreneur:

• Through the creation of start-ups based on the ideas developed during the summer programme and other ideas
• By boosting your chances of being employed by start-ups, SME´s and bigger companies engaged in the development, production and marketing of new food products
• By improving your chances of being employed in local, national and international activities in administration, teaching and training
• By improving your chances of being employed by NGOs and media companies

This is supported by the fact that the media's focus on nutrition and diet has accelerated in recent years and nutrition for health is attracting considerable financial investment, research attention and interest from consumers.

Duration & Dates

The programme lasts 3 weeks, from the 13th of June until the 30th of June 2022.