Study Visit in Lithuania: Strategic Networking

This event will bring together participants in Vilnius, Lithuania, to explore how policy, investment, and public-private collaboration shape innovation in the agrifood and bioeconomy sectors.

The third study visit will take place on 25–26 November 2025 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and an emerging hub for agrifood innovation in the Baltic region. With strong foundations in life sciences, digital technologies, and sustainability, Vilnius represents a dynamic intersection of sectors increasingly converging in agrifood. Lithuania’s rich agricultural landscape and longstanding farming traditions support a robust network of food producers, processors, and startups. The city is also home to leading universities and research institutes that collaborate with local and international companies on smart farming, R&D, and sustainable food solutions. This vibrant ecosystem, marked by active public-private partnerships, makes Vilnius a forward-looking centre for agrifood development in Northern and Eastern Europe—an ideal setting for our third study visit.

This study visit will be strategically anchored around the Agri-Food Forum on 26 November, Lithuania’s national platform for innovation, investment, and policy dialogue in agrifood and the bioeconomy. The timing and location offer a unique opportunity to engage directly with stakeholders—government representatives, startups, investors, researchers, and civil society—at a moment when critical discussions and decisions are taking place.

The visit will focus on exploring barriers to innovation and how they are being addressed through coordinated national strategies and real-time stakeholder engagement. It will also allow the SIXFOLD project to:

• Bridge EU-level innovation agendas with national policy discussions through direct interaction with representatives from Seimas (the Lithuanian Parliament) and Invest Lithuania.
• Leverage the momentum of the Agri-Food Forum to explore barriers through participatory formats such as hackathons, panel debates, and study sessions.
• Engage startups and key players actively seeking funding and collaboration, especially in bioeconomy and digital transformation sectors.
• Validate earlier findings from Work Package 1 by testing them in a live national context and collecting targeted feedback through co-creation activities.

Which Living Labs are featured and what makes them significant:

• Invest Lithuania will be examined as a national-level Living Lab for innovation enablement. It plays a critical role in attracting investment, fostering public-private partnerships, and promoting digital and green transitions in the agrifood sector. This makes it a key case for understanding how structural and financial frameworks can accelerate innovation adoption at scale.
• The Agri-Food Forum will serve as a Living Lab for stakeholder engagement and policy co-creation. As a high-level event uniting government, startups, researchers, and civil society, it offers real-world insight into how collaborative, multi-actor settings influence national priorities and strengthen innovation ecosystems.

The study visit will explore how these two Living Labs:

• Facilitate collaboration between policy and practice.
• Enable the scaling of agrifood innovations.
• Address structural and strategic barriers to innovation in a national context.

This visit will contribute directly to SIXFOLD’s broader goal of identifying enabling conditions for innovation across the EU. Insights gathered in Vilnius will support the development of practical models for barrier resolution and stakeholder alignment within regional and European innovation ecosystems.