Sustainable value creation in the agricultural sector. A literature review

Abstract

The sustainable value framework (Hart and Milstein, 2003) allows conducting a diagnostics of a firm regarding its strategies for the creation of sustainable business value. We have applied this instrument to the field of agricultural business. The analysis of literature made it possible to identify activities that source value creation for agricultural enterprises. The activities were grouped into six topics, namely collaboration, diversification, product identity, distribution channels, knowledge and innovations, changes in production. Applying the sustainable value framework to locate these six topics allowed drawing the conclusions that agricultural enterprises are successful in pursuing business strategies in near-term perspective in both internal and external dimensions, while long-term oriented strategies such as innovativeness, knowledge acquisition and collaborations with external stakeholders are out of the radar of agricultural enterprises. These conclusions lead to the need to explore what agricultural enterprises require in order to create sustainable value in all segments of the framework. Acknowledgement :