Organizing knowledge transfer between university and agribusiness firms

Abstract

The agribusiness sector represents an economic sector of particular importance and with the highest employment rate. The sector is very complex due to the characteristics of the organizations that are part of it and need to base their competitive advantage on innovations often obtained by sharing knowledge with third organizations. The study highlights the main theories of the key organizational factors that influence the knowledge transfer process between universities and firms and presents the first results of an exploratory analysis, aimed to understand what are the key organizational factors identified by the entrepreneurs of the agribusiness sector that affect knowledge transfer for innovation, in particular from universities and high educational institutions. The study can help agribusiness organizations to activate and manage their interorganizational relationships in order to improve their mechanism of knowledge sharing for innovation and shed light for scholars on an important business sector.

Agribusiness diversification and technological innovation efficiency: A U‐shaped relationship

“…Clay and Feeney (2019) argue that the concept of agribusiness is naturally associated with value chains, which comprise a certain product at the consumer table, and various value‐adding operations required for it to occur. Therefore, from the perspective of agribusiness value chains, we consider agribusiness firms as any firm engaging in the production, manufacturing, distribution, and retailing activities of agricultural products and services (Barnard et al, 2020; Lusk & Hudson, 2004; Van Fleet, 2016; Vesperi et al, 2021) to comprehensively capture the features of agribusiness value chain activities performed “from farm to fork.” However, not all agribusiness firms were selected as our research sample. We limited our research sample of agribusiness firms based on the following sample selection process.…”

Decision Making for Knowledge Management in the Tequila Sector: A Fuzzy Logic Model

“…The agribusiness sector is no exception; they must implement knowledge management practices to achieve this. That sector is characterized by small family businesses with a low propensity to generate knowledge and innovation (Vesperi et al, 2021).…”

Inter-organizational relationships in agri-food sector: a bibliometric review and future directions

“…In this context, there has been a growing interest that has widened the debate on knowledge management (KM) in agri-food organizations (Dania et al, 2018) as a key-factor in value creation (Lin, 2007;Omotayo, 2015). The study of agri-food organizations is not simple due to the lack of a univocal definition of the boundaries of the sector (Vesperi et al, 2021), also reflected in the different ways in which the operating organizations are defined (Grandori, 2015).…”