Foreword: networking for innovation in agrifood SMEs

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal on Chain and Network Science on 'Networking for innovation in agri-food SMEs' is organized around six articles, one editorial article and five research articles. It is noteworthy that four articles out of six (namely the editorial and the research articles by Abdirahman et al., 2014a; Ruitenburg et al., 2014 and Minarelli et al., 2014) are proposed within the framework of the FP7 European NetGrow project (www.netgrow.eu) developed around a consortium of nine

Primary Industry Chains and Networks: Analysis for Public and Private Interests

“…Primary industry features backward and forward linkages between economic actors (Sauvee, ; Harland, ) and emergent manufacturing and service functions (de Janvry, ) that add value throughout the chain (Gereffi and Fernandez‐Stark, ). In this setting, primary industry serves to add value to raw, unrefined or un‐extracted material rather than purvey it to firms in other industries (Carter and Easton, ).…”