ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how digitization can accelerate convergence in science and innovation, examining how it can support design, operation, and adaptive learning for the system as a whole and for actors along supply chains and markets. It briefly reviews key tenets of convergence science and innovation (CI). The first key enabler of CI is the combination of recent advances scientific understanding of real-world human behavior, with the knowledge the people have on intersectoral and multi-scale pathways creating real-world contexts. Behavioral analytics, artificial intelligence, and other digital technologies can inform the design of theory-informed and evidence-based health/food/nutrition-promoting innovation and/or interventions, be these of a digital, social, or physical nature. Multi-stakeholder digital platforms and research infrastructures to support agri-food innovation are currently emerging around the world. Convergence research and innovation may sketch a powerful distributed alternative to the still prevailing vertically integrated model of agri-food systems.
