Partners
Ecosystem Navigators
Together with Søren Madsen and Chris Karman Ecosystem Navigators has been founded.
Søren Madsen
Holding a B. sc. in Chemical Engineering and a MBA Executive in technology and innovation management, Søren has been working with almost all aspects of innovation in food, food-tech and ag-tech value chains.
Søren navigate easily between the visionary, strategic, tactical and the hard work approach to find new ways to increase competitiveness for companies, food regions, food clusters and food ecosystems.
During the last 12 years Søren has been playing a key role in building up Agro Food Park in Aarhus, Denmark, being the mastermind behind the strategic value proposition and the core concept. Today Agro Food Park is an internationally recognized Innovation Ecosystem with about 80 food and food related companies and institutions and around 1.250 people working there.
Beside his position as clusterpreneur and m3 manager for Agro Food Park, Søren has been working as a consultant for business regions and business parks in Denmark as well as abroad.
Søren is also member of the Board of Trustees for The European Foundation for Cluster Excellence based in Barcelona.
Chris Karman
Educated as an ecologist, Chris understands the importance of the relationships between the players in an ecosystem. In his career, relationships have become more and more important. He worked with research organisations, government and industry in a broad range of sectors (including maritime, waterworks, agriculture, food and chemistry). His real profession and passion is understanding and applying business relationships. Working with people to achieve new common goals, either leading or coaching, has a much broader scope of application than the research alone. Working in applied research, Chris took various positions from research manager, head of department and commercial director of one of the Sciences groups of Wageningen University and Research.
Chris played a key role in the merger of the marine research institutes of Wageningen UR and TNO; founded the Maritime Campus Netherlands and was a member of the leading team for development of the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Metropolitan Solutions. As an independent consultant Chris has supported the development of many initiatives, including a.o. the Foodvalley 2030 programme (acceleration of the agrifood innovation cluster in the Netherlands), the Salination-cluster (‘Zoet Zout Knooppunt’, with a focus on connection of academia, policy makers and farmers around critical salinization challenges) and DigiShape (creation of an innovation platform for digital transformation of the dutch water sector).
