How is Digitalization Affecting Agri-food?

New Business Models, Strategies and Organizational Forms

Maria Carmela Annosi, Federica Brunetta, Maria Carmela Annosi, Federica Brunetta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Using real cases of food fi rms and agriculture supply chains as a context, How is Digitalization Affecting Agri-food? New Business Models, Strategies and Organizational Forms aims to understand the key themes in strategic and organizational research in this area.

Despite the importance of food and agriculture in the current political and societal context, analysis of the impact of digitalization and information technologies on the industry is still limited. The objective of this monograph is to understand the direction of this change. With case studies of food firms and agriculture supply chains it sets out to conceptualize food organizing and organizations as a fruitful object of inquiry, both at the intra and interorganizational levels. It aims to understand new business models, strategies, and organizational forms. Contributions in this stream of research have the potential to yield important and relevant insights for both scholars and societies.

This book is written primarily for academics engaged in innovation management or strategy, or conducting organizational behavior research. It will also be of relevance to practitioners and managers in the agri-food industry.

Part I

Theories and concepts

1The impact of digitalization

A review on the issue

Maria Carmela Annosi, Federica Brunetta, and Li Peichan

Introduction

Assisted by digital technologies, digitalization has changed society enormously. Digitization is recognized as the digitalized formats and data that are able to change the business or business model (Gobble, 2018). It is assisted by digital technologies as well as the combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity (Bharadwaj et al., 2013). Digitalization is empowering, refining, and renovating current businesses as well as society. Digital technologies are indeed relevant from both an economic and social point of view, as they create disruptions, change the boundaries of entire industries, and change the rules of competition (Christensen, 2007; Porter and Heppleman, 2014).

Yoo (2012) proposes a more comprehensive definition of digitalization, describing it as “the encoding of analog information into a digital format and the subsequent reconfiguration of the socio-technical context of production and consumption of the product and services.”

The resulting “4.0 Era,” which represents the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” is providing organizations with both opportunities and challenges, imposing profound transformations to organizations, politics, and society. Technologies underlying digitalization have changed not only the existing way companies are doing business but have also created brand-new companies. Together with digitalization, the impact is far-reaching from both a macro and micro point of view. They are part of the organizational core processes (Alaimo and Kallinikos, 2017), while at the same time transforming entire ecosystems in the way information is produced, controlled, and circulated (Scott, 1995).

Digitalization undoubtedly modifies the company’s operational and commercial activities (Calia et al., 2007) as well as strategies and business models (Barrett and Davidson, 2008; Bharadwaj et al., 2013). At the same time, entire ecosystems are recreated (Teece, 2010).

In order to keep the business alive and retain competitive advantages, companies need to react to digitalization and digital technology innovation properly, often implementing changes at the business model level (Zott and Amit, 2010). Business models (BM) are commonly recognized as the way that organizations create, deliver, and capture values in various contexts, such as economic, social, and cultural (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010).

Immense literature about Business Models has emerged, as well as technology innovation. However, there is not much literature that focuses on how digitalization, with its digital technology as an innovation, affects the way companies are doing business. Therefore, this research will focus on how digitalization impacts business in the context of business model design and strategy. Literature reviews are an important part of any research project, and a systematic literature review can provide researchers with a precise reviewing process (Tranfield et al., 2003). In this chapter, we present a systematic literature review to better understand digitalization in business.

Systematic literature review: the methodology

This research followed a three-stage procedure, including planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting and dissemination (Tranfield et al., 2003).

In this first stage, the objective of the research and the key data source were identified, with a specific focus on the database Web of Science. The second stage of conducting the review contained five steps: (1) identification of research, (2) selection of studies, (3) study quality assessment, (4) data extraction and monitoring progress, and (5) data synthesis.

Instead of using digitalization as a keyword solely, words with wider meanings were selected, including “Digital*,” “Cyber*,” “Big data,” “AI,” “Artificial intelligence,” “Industry 4.0,” and “Smart*.” Meanwhile, to avoid overlap, the operator “OR” was used to connect all keywords selected while searching. (TS=Digital* OR Cyber* OR Big data OR Artificial intelligence OR AI OR Industry 4.0 OR Smart*). Keywords were used as a selection criterion for the topic. We restricted the time frame of research to 2008–2018. Besides keywords and publication years, the initial search of database was set as: document types “article”; language “English”; and subject area “business” and “management.” To further restrict the quality of the database, the sources of the articles in the database had to be clustered. In this research, only 4 and 4* journals according to Academic Journal Guide 2018 (ABS, 2018) were selected. As such, all the articles in the database are of high quality in business and management fields.

This initial search gained a total of 632 articles, which were then further analyzed. A synthesis of the outcomes from the top ten journals publishing related articles is shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Top ten journals publishing digitalization research

Source title	Records	% of 632
Mis Quarterly	78	12.34
Information Systems Research	73	11.55
European Journal of Operational Research	67	10.60
Journal of Management Information Systems	56	8.86
Tourism Management	46	7.28
Management Science Marketing Science Journal of Product Innovation Management Research Policy Journal of Marketing	45 40 30 28 26	7.12 6.33 4.75 4.43 4.11

Grouping

To further classify the articles, we grouped them in distinct categories. The grouping method followed the research by Crossan and Apaydin (2010). The first group (Group 1) contains only reviews and meta-analysis. The second group (Group 2) consisted of selected papers centered on citation-based selection criteria for the initial dataset. The last group (Group 3) included residual articles from the initial dataset. There were no duplicate articles within each group.

•Group 1 Reviews and meta-analyses. To select reviews and meta-analyses, “review” or “meta” were added in the search term based on topic (title, keywords, or abstract). (TS = “Digital* OR Cyber* OR Big data OR Artificial intelligence OR AI OR Industry 4.0 OR Smart*” AND “Review OR meta”) As a result, 67 articles were included in group 1.

•Group 2 Oft-cited articles. Because no abstract analysis was done yet, the dataset remained 632 articles from the initial search. Following the standard set out by Crossan and Apaydin (2010), articles with at least five citations per year were chosen in group 2. This filter classified 419 articles in group 2.

•Group 3 Residual articles/recent articles. There were 213 residual articles that left from the filter in group 2. After a rough analysis, one possible explanation of these low citation rates was the recent publishing years, since they were mostly from 2016 to 2018.

The grouping result of the initial dataset is shown in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Grouping result of initial dataset

Group	Initial dataset
Group 1 Reviews and meta-analyses	67
Group 2 Highly cited articles	419
Group 3 Recent articles	213
Total	632

Data extraction

In order to select articles...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Theories and concepts
• Part II Challenges and current strategies in digitalization in agri-food
• Part III The emerging promises of Internet of Things (IOT) and digital ecosystems in agri-food
• Part IV The evolution of digitalization in agri-food
• Index