A lexicon about innovation in research and innovation projects for agrifood system transformation and sustainability transitions

Between 2019 and 2025, the European Commission funded 82 Research & Innovation projects in the agricultural sector across the globe with the main goal to support agrifood system transformation and sustainability transitions. To analyze the type of innovations developed and promoted by these projects, we used a text-mining approach on a corpus of various projects' documents (including project descriptions, project reports, descriptions of project events, publications, and websites), produced at different stages of their implementation. Since these Research & Innovation projects addressed agricultural innovation challenges from different angles (i.e. different innovation purposes, strategies, stakeholders, processes and outcomes), we decided to create a comprehensive lexicon on innovation. This lexicon covers six entry points to analyze multi-dimensional innovation: innovation actors, triggers, processes, outputs, purposes and phases. This data paper presents the lexicon and the methodology used to create it. The lexicon is composed of 717 keywords in English, divided into 44 concepts and associated with the 6 entry points presented above. It has been built iteratively, through 3 workshops with experts in agricultural innovation. The lexicon is intended to be used as a semantic layer in knowledge management tools, for instance to identify the most cited keywords and the most frequent keyword associations according to the type of documents, the localization of projects and the phase of implementation. These results contribute to building typologies of Research & Innovation projects to better understand the contribution of large project portfolios funded by the European Commission to innovation and impact.