Agri-Food Firms and Knowledge in Uncertain Times: A Research Agenda

Abstract

The current competitive context - highly uncertain and rapidly changing - requires organizations to exploit resources such as knowledge and innovation. The introduction of new knowledge within organizations represents a response to the changes and uncertainty of the competitive environment. Not all organizations are able to generate new knowledge - useful for generating competitive advantage - internally. For this reason, they must establish inter-organizational relationships with the main producers and disseminators of new knowledge. The main producers and disseminators of new knowledge are the Universities and Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). There is a strong integration between the university system and the business system. For this reason, understanding the relationships between organizations and universities represents a perspective of analysis as a response to uncertainty. This study is based on a systemic review of the literature methodology. The literature review is based on two multidisciplinary databases (SCOPUS and WEB of SCIENCE). Subsequently, the selected scientific documents - through a search string and following the PRISMA protocol (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyzes) - were processed through bibliometric software to highlight some aspects of the scientific landscape such as co-citation analysis, keywords most used and relationship between keywords. The results of this study offer a mapping of the main theories on agrifood firms and inter-organizational relationships with university structures - under the perspective of knowledge management - as a response to the continuous changes of the external environment