Researching the research

What farmers need to learn for the bioeconomy: the process behind a four-country study of digital and entrepreneurial skills in agriculture, with Nikos Apostolopoulos. Four countries, four languages, four education systems, and one question: how do you compare them?

More than half of the people who work in the European bioeconomy work in agriculture. So what do farmers, agronomists, consultants and policy makers need to learn to be part of that change? A team from Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweden asked them, using two European Commission frameworks as a common language: DigComp for digital skills and EntreComp for entrepreneurial skills.

I talk with Nikolaos (Nikos) Apostolopoulos, Associate Professor in European Policies in Sustainability, Development and Entrepreneurship at the University of the Peloponnese, where he directs the Laboratory of European Sustainable Development Policies. He is one of the authors of the study, published in 2025 in the journal Agriculture. This episode is not only about the results, but about what the paper does not show.

In this episode:

• Why DigComp and EntreComp were a tool, not the object of study, and why they work together.
• The "hybrid" competence profile: the same person reads data from a sensor and sees value in agricultural waste.
• What did not go to plan: an unbalanced sample, only three Swedish farmers, and the sentence the team decided not to write.
• How to coordinate a European project: clear ownership of tasks, common tools and trust in local partners.
• The core dilemma of any multi-country study: how much do you standardize, and how much do you adapt?
• From the paper: 71% of respondents had no bioeconomy course in their latest qualification, and only one in three was willing to pay for that training.
• Advice for starters: do not spend five years writing another list of competencies. Study which skills matter for whom, how they combine in real decisions, and who trains the trainers.

Recorded asynchronously: Nikos recorded his answers in Greece, and I recorded my questions separately.

Guest:
Nikos Apostolopoulos, University of the Peloponnese
Email: [email protected]
Profile: https://www.uop.gr/en/staff-memberen/anikos

Read the paper (open access): Digital and Entrepreneurial Competencies for the Bioeconomy: Perceptions and Training Needs of Agricultural Professionals in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Sweden (Agriculture, 2025): https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture15101106

Chapters:
00:00 Intro: why this matters beyond agriculture
04:41 Before the paper: choosing DigComp and EntreComp
14:30 The hybrid competence profile
16:18 What did not go to plan: an unbalanced sample
23:47 Coordinating a project across four countries
32:49 Standardize or adapt: the core dilemma
37:32 Advice for starters: not another list of skills
44:44 Skill combinations and training the trainers
48:12 Outro: four ideas to take away

More: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english
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In today's episode, historical linguists and language documentarists Francesco Perono Cacciafoco (Associate Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, https://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/study/departments/school-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/department-of-applied-linguistics/department-staff/academic-staff/staff/francesco-perono) and Shiyue Wu (Linguistics' major at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) discuss their research on Historical Linguistics and endangered and undocumented languages.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384116301784

Link to the postdoc fellowship call:

https://tinyurl.com/twjdc

If you want to continue discussion about this episode and in general about the themes we talk in our podcast (how research is made, how to do it more efficiently, interviews to researchers, etc) then join our discord community at:

https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

Or contact me at:

https://horacio-ps.com 

If you want to go far in your research it is crucial to be productive and nowadays there are many interesting productivity apps and systems that you can use for that. But the problem is that there are many! And it is very difficult to find one that suits all your needs. Another problem in this regard is that when you collaborate with other researchers they will probably use other productivity applications, so at the end you spend a lot of time switching between productivity and time management applications.

Today's interviewee has a solution for this! Nunzio Martinello:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nunziomartinello/?originalSubdomain=in

is the CEO of Akiflow, and they developed Akiflow proposing the idea of consolidated apps. Akiflow allows you to have a central dashboard  with calendar which allows you to integrate and sync tasks from many different systems such as gmail, Trello, Todoist, etc, and Zapier, which allows you an even higher number of integrations.

So today we had Nunzio in the podcast and he gave some very interesting explanations about Akiflow and answered our questions. We really recommend you to use it:

https://akiflow.com

If you want to continue discussion about this episode and in general about the themes we talk in our podcast (how research is made, how to do it more efficiently, interviews to researchers, etc) then join our discord community at:

https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

PS: Background music "Let the sunshine" from "Keep Calm and Podcast":

https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast

First journal club episode from our Structural Bioinformatics and High Performance Computing (BIO-HPC) community which you can joint at:

https://discord.gg/fZyNYTsT7k

where we discussed about the paper "Making it Rain: Cloud-Based Molecular Simulations for Everyone":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c00998

with its first author, Pablo Arantes from University of California Riverside:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pablo-Arantes

It would be great to have you in our next Journal Club!

PS: Background music "Let the sunshine" from "Keep Calm and Podcast":

https://pod.co/keep-calm-and-podcast

In this episode we focus around the computer simulation technique Molecular Dynamics (MD), which allows the study of the dynamics of systems of biological relevance. For such purpose we have the pleasure to interview Prof. Hugo Verli from UFRGS, Brazil:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fB-31L4AAAAJ&hl=es

and you can contact via email in case of questions at:

[email protected] 

or 

[email protected]

We also talked about his research career, his views about the research process and many other interesting topics.

If you want to continue discussion about this episode then join our discord community at:

https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

Interview with key topics in nanotechnology and graphene research with Romain Danneau from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology:

https://www.int.kit.edu/1244_romain.danneau.php

you can contact him directly through his email address (link below) if you have questions about his very interesting research.

We also talked about his research career, his views about the research process and how to manage a research group.

If you want to continue discussion about this episode then join our discord community at:

https://discord.gg/3dN7pQNWAk

This is an episode in the productivity for researchers series. Today I explain why multitasking can be very efficient or perhaps the only way to work on multiple difficult research projects or creative processes, taking advantage of our subconscious mind to find solutions or unblock us.

Contact me at: horacio (at) horacio-ps.com if you want to join our webinar where I will live and interactively explain the technique. 

If you want you can continue it here in our public Telegram group at:

https://t.me/researching_research  

Thanks for listening!

PS: Image taken from:

https://thenounproject.com/term/multitasking/995438/

This is the first episode about startups, where I comment main similarities and differences between research groups in academia and startups. It is based on a very interesting blog post from Charl Both, from Delft University:

https://cpbotha.net/2012/07/24/startups-vs-academic-research-groups-fight/

At the end of the episode there are some open questions for discussion. If you want you can continue it here in our public Telegram group at:

https://t.me/researching_research  

Thanks for listening!

BTW: Spanish version of the episode:

https://anchor.fm/horacio-ps/episodes/Grupos-de-investigacin-y-startups-similitudes-y-diferencias-e17b92q

PS: Image taken from:

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/businessman-startup-success-arrow-2330853/

Maria Bzówka is a PhD student from Tunneling group, Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, working on developing computational methods and their application to biomolecular systems. She visited our research group in September, and we learnt a lot of things from her! In today’s show, we talked about her career, research and views about science

If you want to know more about her, please check the following websites about:

a) her research group:

http://www.tunnelinggroup.pl/

http://www.aquaduct.pl/

https://twitter.com/tunnelinggroup

b) the software Aquaduct:

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/36/8/2599/5682414

https://www.livecomsjournal.org/index.php/livecoms/article/view/v2i1e21383

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HKtINTemsI

c) her COVID papers:

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/9/3099/htm

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/4/2065/htm

d) her hsEH Review:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462100252X

You can contact her at:

[email protected]  or [email protected]

https://twitter.com/BzowkaMaria

The recording of this episode was performed at UCAM thanks to the audio recording and edition assistance of UCAM’s Unit for Scientific Culture and Innovation (Unidad de Cultura Científica e Innovación). Special thanks to Francisco Ruiz.

And last but not least, you can continue the discussion about the show in our Telegram group:

https://t.me/researching_research