Kubota is continuing its investment in European innovation networks to accelerate the development of future agricultural machinery, thereby helping to speed up the environmental, social and economic transition of the agricultural sector.
Since 2021, Kubota Innovation Center Europe has been a member of the French innovation cluster Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation. Thanks to its network of more than 420 members and its team of around twenty people, Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation supports Kubota’s open innovation strategy: identifying and putting people in contact with key technologies, organising working groups and workshops focusing on priority sectors, organising demonstrations, etc.
“Through this membership and partnership, Kubota has been able to identify companies with very interesting technologies to meet the challenges of agriculture in the future. We are now working together in this area directly with several agricultural partners interested in this type of win-win collaboration. This has been greatly facilitated by the cluster’s action,” emphasises Daria Batukhtina, Strategic Business Development Manager at Kubota Innovation Centre Europe.
The agricultural sector in southwestern France is representative of southwest-European agriculture in general and thus makes it an ideal testing ground. Maintaining production capacity, in a context of climate change and ecosystem restoration, requires new approaches. Agricultural equipment should no longer be seen as standalone products, but will become advanced equipment integrated into an eco-system of solutions and services. This changes technical and economic models dramatically. The environment of Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation, which brings together hundreds of players working to find innovative solutions, is also an ideal space for development and experimentation.
“The major international players are changing their innovation process to source from the heart of innovative ecosystems, where tomorrow’s solutions are created, from public research laboratories to start-ups or more mature companies, and are increasingly in direct contact with farmers’ groups. The cluster’s support for these large groups enables them to move faster, to support the most promising technologies and to identify more easily the differentiating levers of their future solutions for users” says Laurent Augier, General Manager of the Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation competitiveness cluster.
Kubota is working on the regional dynamics of innovation and will soon reinforce its European team with a person located in the South-West region. This will further promote links with innovation networks, with their current and future partners and with farmers, co-developers and experimenters of the brand’s future solutions.