ASPLAN VIAK AS

Their core work

Asplan Viak is a large Norwegian multidisciplinary consulting firm specializing in planning, architecture, and engineering services. Within H2020, they contribute spatial planning and rural development expertise to European agri-food projects, bridging the gap between policy-level rural strategies and on-the-ground technology adoption. Their work spans from collaborative rural policy design (PoliRural) to IoT-driven smart farming platforms (DEMETER) and climate-adaptive agriculture (STARGATE), consistently bringing a planner's perspective to agricultural modernization challenges.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

All three of Asplan Viak's H2020 projects began in 2019, so the evolution is compressed into a single entry period rather than a gradual shift. However, the keyword distribution reveals a clear thematic broadening: early involvement centered on rural policy, farming, and text mining (PoliRural), while later-phase work expanded into IoT, sensors, data science, interoperability, and precision agriculture (DEMETER, STARGATE). This suggests a deliberate move from policy-oriented rural consulting toward technology-enabled smart agriculture.

Asplan Viak is moving from traditional rural planning toward digitally-enabled agricultural solutions, making them increasingly relevant for projects that need to connect technology deployment with regional planning and policy frameworks.

How they like to work

Asplan Viak operates exclusively as a project participant, never as coordinator — consistent with a consulting firm contributing specialized expertise to larger research consortia. Their 121 unique partners across 25 countries from just 3 projects indicates involvement in very large consortia (40+ partners each), suggesting they are comfortable operating within complex, multi-national project structures. This makes them a reliable, low-maintenance partner who integrates into existing consortium architectures rather than demanding a leadership role.

Despite only three projects, Asplan Viak has built connections with 121 unique partners across 25 European countries — a remarkably broad network driven by participation in large-scale flagship consortia like DEMETER and STARGATE. Their network is pan-European with no obvious geographic bias beyond their Norwegian base.

What sets them apart

Asplan Viak brings a rare combination: they are a large, established planning and engineering consultancy — not a university or tech startup — applying decades of spatial planning experience to the agricultural digitization challenge. This makes them uniquely suited for projects that need someone to translate between technology developers, farmers, and regional policymakers. For consortium builders, they offer the reliability and institutional capacity of a large firm with genuine domain knowledge in rural and agricultural planning.

Highlights from their portfolio

• DEMETER
  A large-scale Innovation Action building an interoperable agri-food data platform — one of H2020's flagship smart farming projects with broad industry participation.
• PoliRural
  Largest EC contribution to Asplan Viak (EUR 287,256), focused on future-oriented rural policy using text mining and foresight methods — an unusual blend of data analytics and policy.