Intellectual capital in support of farm businesses’ strategic management: a case study

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role of and relationships between human, structural and relational capital assets for strategic management in a farm business. In particular, it analyzes the interaction between human capital’s creativity skills and the introduction of climate-smart technologies for the competitiveness of the firm. Design/methodology/approach An explorative case study was conducted on one of the largest Italian farm businesses to gain an understanding of the drivers of intellectual capital (IC) and of their implications for strategic management. Full-time employees’ perception of the skills required to achieve strategic goals and their perception of whether they possessed these abilities were investigated to determine if an alignment was present. The skills were subsequently classified using the framework of Amabile (1988) into domain-relevant and creativity-relevant skills. Then, two linear regression models were used to investigate the effects of training on the acquisition of these two sets of skills. Findings The analysis confirmed the strategic role of interactions among human capital assets to effectively exploit the structural capital of the company. When investigating employees’ perceptions, a gap emerged about informatics capabilities and knowledge of soils. As the company’s investments in innovation are oriented to ICT technologies, the company could strengthen informatics training to enable its employees to implement effective innovation. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature on IC by highlighting the role of interconnections of assets to align organizations with their strategic goals. Therefore, the provision of IC accounting contributes to the strategic management of human capital.

The Challenge of Feeding the World

“…When professional agricultural users start to introduce new smart solutions in the operation of agricultural companies, they can count on the IT knowledge of their workforce; however, during the self-evaluation of employee knowledge, managers always have to pay attention to the Dunning-Kruger effect [94]. The above effect means that less educated workforce usually overestimates their knowledge-and this circumstance is totally typical in the case of IT knowledge in the agricultural sector [95]. Ultimately, the issue of food security applies to people as well as to finite resources.…”

Perspective directions of state regulation of competition between human and artificial intellectual capital in Industry 4.0

“…AI could increase the innovative potential of modern companies (proved by the example of construction companies). Cavicchi and Vagnoni, (2018) write that intellectual capital provides support for strategic management of the agrarian business. The perspectives of improvement of this business are connected to implementation of AI.…”

Competition between human and artificial intellectual capital in production and distribution in Industry 4.0

“…The conceptual and applied issues of using the modern possibilities of automatization based on the leading digital technologies in distribution in Industry 4.0 and resulting competition between human (presented by workers of marketing, logistics and sales—e.g. sales managers) and artificial intellectual capital in distribution are studied in the works Bayraktaroglu et al (2019), Cavicchi and Vagnoni (2018), Duodu and Rowlinson (2019), Gashenko et al (2017), Gashenko et al (2016), Gashenko and Zima (2019), Gashenko et al (2018), Matos et al (2017), and Sharma and Dharni (2017).…”