Cultivating Global Entrepreneurs in the Food Supply Chain

Abstract

Food supply chain from an entrepreneur's perspective has many needs today. To cultivate food entrepreneurs addressing the growing global demand in food, there is an emerging trend in integrating vital players in food supply chain to form food clusters. Like most of start-up entrepreneurs in other industries, food entrepreneurs have their challenges of identifying market opportunities, building a trusted management team, and securing funding sources to run the businesses. They also need facilities to produce their foods, the facilities needed to be certified by local food authorities, securing product liability insurance, and marketing channels to distribute their food products. In this paper, we discussed how LSU Food Incubator is established and developed to address those challenges. Specifically, it is a “Flying High, Landing Soft” platform. We plan to empower the platform with mobile cloud learning practices and capabilities and extend this platform to emerging markets like Turkey.