Abstract
Open innovation, understood as a strategy for business competitiveness, has experienced growing relevance, even in traditional economic sectors, such as agri-food. This article focuses on the trends and challenges of open innovation applied to the agri-food field, based on two approaches, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a structured survey, answered mainly by micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). For the SLR, the Scopus bibliographic database was chosen. Documents were filtered by type, novelty, and impact factor of the journal (based on the Scimago Rank). The final selection included 50 articles that were deeply analyzed. In addition, the survey was applied to 57 agri-food companies from the department of Nariño (Colombia), establishing a diagnosis of the extent of openness of their collaborative barriers and innovation capacities. The review’s results revealed a marked European dominance in this research field. Product co-creation, eco-innovation, and bioeconomy are main fields of interest and application of open innovation. The challenges identified are related to intellectual property rights and effective communication between stakeholders. The survey was successful in establishing a statistically significant correlation between innovation performance and collaboration with external partners. As a conclusion, an open innovation approach can provide dynamism and cohesion in agri-food systems.
Highlights
Innovation is more frequently perceived as a main determinant of businesses success, effective performance, and organization survival, regardless of their size and influence sector [1,2]
The review was complemented and contrasted with a structured survey applied to a sample of 57 agrifood companies from the department of Nariño (Colombia), which sought to establish a diagnosis of their capacities of innovation and motivation to collaborate with external partners
The results showed that 86% of the studied companies had no knowledge of the concept of open innovation before answering the questionnaire
Summary
Innovation is more frequently perceived as a main determinant of businesses success, effective performance, and organization survival, regardless of their size and influence sector [1,2]. Administration management researchers and professionals are interested in understanding the underlying drivers of innovation and their effect on business performance [3]. The concept of open innovation was born within this context and was first formulated by the North American professor, Henry Chesbrough, who defined it as “the use of internal and external flows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for external use of that innovation” [5,6]. The cornerstone of open innovation is the use of external knowledge by a company in order to accelerate its own internal innovation process [7]
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