Pregledni rad
BUSINESS INCUBATION SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS AND RURAL COMMUNITIES
Davor Salamon
; Stratevis d. o. o., Zagreb, Hrvatska
Đurđica Knapić Salamon
; Stratevis d. o. o., Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
This paper explores the conditions, environment and problems and presents the focused and partial results of our two years-research for the purpose of Zadar County, aiming to de-termine the optimal model of organization of agricultural producers in terms of the supply concentration and their integration into the existing food supply chains/value chains, as well as activities within the local food chains.
The starting analysis encompasses the food systems at the crossing of global and local processes, and recognizes the development of the two systems with a diverged, although partially interwoven, courses of action, with different implications for the design of business models and strategies. One direction is determined by the development of mostly vertically integrated corporatized food systems with the tendency of introduction and delivery/sales of high value-added products, especially processed foods. The second direction (as an alter-native to the first one) is determined by local food production/consumption features, being characterized by predominantly horizontal cooperation of all stakeholders involved, in the context of its compliance with environmental requirements, achieving sustainable deve-lopment, circularity, as well as strengthening local economic, social and other content (civic agriculture).
The accumulation of knowledge by learning and innovation development and its conversi-on into active development resources in order to mobilize other development resources is the primary task of rural entrepreneurship. Co-operatives and producer organizations re-present the recognized first circle, the cluster accumulation of knowledge based on hori-zontal cooperativeness of the stakeholders involved. So called 'Traditional Co-operatives’ however, unlike the 'new generation cooperatives' ('Value-added' Cooperatives) contain in-herent, theoretically solid-documented problems of incentive, limiting their possible achie-vements.
The development of entrepreneurship and innovation infrastructure through local part-nerships, and business incubation respectively, is a good way of activating the available business resources, regardless of their organizational form. The incubators are recognized as a basic instrument of business incubation, with a task of providing special functions in rural areas that make them different from 'urban' incubators. By analyzing different types of rural incubators (from elementary to agroparks and food parks), their functions, content/key services that are delivered to users, the need for hybrid rural incubator in the public-private joint venture model has been recognized. Such a dispersed and virtual incubator can certa-inly be a more convenient development tool than a conventional incubator, especially in terms of lack of critical development resources in rural areas, low levels of innovation-driven entrepreneurial culture and poor spatial entrepreneurial texture.
Ključne riječi
food systems; local food systems; rural entrepreneurship; rural community; business incu-bation; hybrid rural incubator
Hrčak ID:
183512
URI
Datum izdavanja:
26.6.2017.
Posjeta: 1.917 *