Exploring agricultural entrepreneurship and new technologies: academic and practitioners' views

What is it about?

This paper aims to discuss the role of new technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data in agricultural entrepreneurship. Despite several studies in this field, no previous studies compare the academic and practitioner perspective. In doing so, we adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative research approach by combining thematic and content analysis by validating the comparison between the two groups with the Kruskal-Wallis statistical test. For the academic analysis, we used the Scopus database. From the practitioner's perspective, we use the European Patent Office (EPO) database. Our results discover a trading zone among the two streams under investigation. Mainly, academics reveal theoretical approaches related to the technology acceptance model with "grand theories" perspectives and practical strategies for entrepreneurial skills to support the agricultural sector. Finally, patents' analysis reveals four common themes: a new business that benefits from artificial intelligence in weather predictions and new smart and intelligent ways to monitor crops. These new businesses use clouds to control plant's humidity. Afterwards, these results are significant because we promote new creativity in future researchers by applying the methodology and new perspectives in this research theme.

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