Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 37

The meaning given to innovation in the field of agriculture therefore takes into account, in part, the specificities of agricultural activity itself: geographical diversity, diversity of sectors, diversity of types of farming: family, entrepreneurial, organizational (cooperatives), etc. Innovation refers to different forms of processes that structure the implementation of technical, institutional and organizational changes and their systemic interactions. Using the term “agricultural innovation” questions whether agriculture as an activity of exploitation of natural ecosystems specifies innovation processes or whether it doesn’t. Therefore, we can propose three axes of differentiation of these specificities, in biophysical, socio-economic or organizational dimensions.

The biophysical dimension concerns the dependence of innovation processes (conditions of emergence, adoption and deployment) on the increasing instability of climatic variables affecting the activity. It also relates to the biological and therefore living dimension of agricultural products. These two attributes determine the instability variables of technical processes (production, conservation) that generate risks and, therefore, collective strategies (coordination, contracts) to regulate these risks. However, in the economic sense, the introduction of this risk factor is an intrinsic reality of innovation.

The second dimension refers to the specificities of the agricultural production function linked to the weakness of economies of scale in agriculture. It is partly explained by a lower rate of return on capital investment than in other sectors. It refers to social structures of production that are still predominantly based on fragmented modes of production using family labor, even if certain forms of agro-industrialization are necessary in certain sectors governed by industrial processing activities such as ripening facilities and the food processing industry.

This limited profitability, due to the structuring of agricultural activity, leads the public authorities to compensate for its shortcomings through public investment in agronomic research, which creates a dynamic dedicated to the governance of innovation that is exogenous to agrarian societies. Thus, even if they do not oppose each other, innovations of an endogenous (induced by farmers and actors themselves) and exogenous (driven by public authorities and other institutions) nature have specific proportions in agriculture. Finally, some cross-cutting innovations (technological, genetic, digital) are the result of inter-organizational and supranational collaborations and require long cycles of diffusion and appropriation.

Finally, agricultural innovation is specific because of the multifunctional nature of the resources it uses, mainly land and water, which have non-market identity heritage functions. These territorially anchored production “factors” make certain agricultural innovations difficult to generalize or transpose from one territory to another.