Engaging Students with Food Industry and Community Stakeholders to Explore Innovation that Addresses Food Insecurity

By Nii Addy and Joëlle Rondeau

The McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE) and Impact Hub Montreal (IHM) supported Enactus McGill to organize the first Food Convergent Innovation Forum on November 30, 2017.

The Forum, hosted at Impact Hub Montreal, brought together over 190 participants, including students, entrepreneurs, industry and community partners, to share insights about the complex problems of food insecurity, and how to address them through convergent innovation.

There was palpable energy in the repurposed church that is home to Impact Hub Montreal. McGill students from various disciplines, food entrepreneurs, and industry and community leaders gathered for the Food Convergent Innovation Forum on the evening of November 30, 2017. This educational event brought together participants from various sectors to gain a holistic understanding of food insecurity. They also explored how to address this complex problem through convergent innovation for sustainable food systems.

Convergent Innovation (CI) is an approach that has been developed through more than a decade of research and industry collaboration under the MCCHE. CI fosters behavior change and societal transformation by instilling social and environmental objectives of agriculture, food product development, nutrition, and health into business models, while improving economic viability of efforts focused on social benefit. This approach simultaneously derives measurable economic, social, and environmental benefits.

Collaborating on the Food Convergent Innovation Forum seemed like a natural fit for MCCHE, Impact Hub Montreal, and Enactus McGill, as they all strive to foster entrepreneurship to improve the health and food environments in Montreal and globally. The event was organized along with World Vision Canada’s Food Security Social Innovation Challenge, and was supported by the Food: Locally Embedded, Globally Engaged (FLEdGE) Partnership, through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant.

The forum included a panel discussion on the role of partnerships in research, training, community initiatives, and entrepreneurship for addressing food insecurity as a complex social problem. The panelists were Milton Caldero, co-director of Mealcare; Jeffrey Baikowitz, founder of MotherFood International; and Francine Masson, president of Integrated Innovation Best Practices at Réseau Technovation Inc. In a call to action, panelists urged students to deepen their understanding of the complexity of problems, and to be entrepreneurial in taking action on the diverse facets of the food security issues.

The panel discussion was followed by a problem analysis and pitching workshop that was designed and facilitated by Enactus McGill members. Small groups of participants analyzed different case studies on food insecurity from various locations: South Sudan, India, USA (Los Angeles), and Northern Canada. Reflection questions allowed groups to explore multiple aspects of food insecurity as lived by communities across the globe. Participants reflected on the ways in which food insecurity could be addressed through a convergent innovation framework. They also developed pitches to communicate their ideas to other groups. This provided a rewarding educational space for students to practice critical thinking and entrepreneurial skills.

Lastly, there was a Food Innovation Challenge, in which social enterprises competed for a chance to win $500 and mentorship from members of the food industry networks of MCCHE. Projects from three different enterprises were pitched:

1. Rawlin, which has the goal of providing students with a healthy, environmentally friendly, and affordable food option on campus while also encouraging the adoption of more sustainable eating habits;
2. PEACE Initiatives Canada (PIC), which has set up a Montreal's first 24 hour outdoor community fridge in Little Burgundy; and
3. Candy Cutlery, which creates flavourful, functional and environmentally friendly food products to enhance eating experiences.

After tough deliberations, a panel of three judges selected Candy Cutlery as the winner, citing among others things their economic viability and environmental benefits.

Participants at the Forum also had the opportunity to expand their horizons by discussing and networking with various organizations and initiatives, including SymBioSyn, Lufa Farms, OceanPath Fellowship, and the Marcel Desautels Institute for Integrated Management (MDIIM).

The Food Convergent Innovation Forum is built on university-community collaborations and explores the role of entrepreneurship in addressing food insecurity from a systems perspective. Organizers and participants of the Forum are building on the successes of the event by developing other collaborative projects and initiatives.

For obtaining more information about emerging collaborative projects and initiatives, or if you would like to be involved, please contact: Nii Addy, nii.addy [at] mcgill.ca.