Agri-food 4.0: drivers and links to innovation and eco-innovation

Digital transformation affects all stages of the agri-food value chain. Digitalisation is being combined with innovations and eco-innovations to gain a competitive advantage and ensure greater sustained competitiveness. However, not all technologies have been implemented in the same way and at the same pace by the different companies in the agri-food sector. The aim of this research is to identify the internal and external drivers of digitalisation in agri-food companies and to develop a synthetic index to rank companies based on those drivers, before examining the relationship between the position in the ranking and innovation. The results reveal that the decisive drivers are management support and competitive pressure rather than external support from government policies or suppliers. Higher ranking companies in terms of the digitalisation process are more proactive in introducing product and radical innovations and are the most eco-innovative and thus sustainability-oriented. Finally, results show that the digitalisation of the sector is marked by the depth of technology implementation, specifically IoT, big data and artificial intelligence. Blockchain technology does not currently make a difference as it is not widely used.