Sustainable supply chain in a new technological era: the case of the Italian agrifood sector

Purpose – The purpose of this work is to explain sustainable innovative behaviors in Italian agrifood firms and to explore concretely how by pursuing openness to open innovations the Italian agrifood firms become sustainable and especially to highlight the fact that the food firms (their manufacturing systems) redefine relations with suppliers (agriculture operators) and innovative supplier actors (agronomic researchers, innovation communities, start-up, etc.). Design/methodology/approach – The methodology of analysis makes use of an empirical survey conducted over a short period (2020–2024) but characterized by profound technological changes that have heavily pervaded the agrifood supply chain. In this context the resource-based view perspective and the relational theory are taken as the most appropriate theoretical references for empirically testing the relationships among Italian firms belonging to diversified sub-sectors of the Italian agrifood supply chain (suppliers, packaging materials manufacturers, machinery manufacturers, biomethane producers) and their great competition in a global context. Findings – Among the main results we highlight first of all that the choices of sustainable innovative processes, such as innovative and efficient agricultural techniques, the efficiently use of new manufacturing process technologies, the industrial use of new raw materials and with different nutrients, etc. generate the better quality outcomes of the each analyzed firm or farm of the supply chain. Secondly, we detect the interaction between the economic actors of the Italian agrifood supply chain, of both the new innovative entrants and those who have always been part of it, have rethought their role in the supply chain innovative processes; it is at the base of the new ways of competing of the Italian agrifood supply chain in an innovative sustainable way. By analyzing cases, the study aims to show that farmers and agrifood firms are very interested to explore border line technologies. Research limitations/implications – Among the limits of the research still in progress are on the one hand the heterogeneity of the case studies, by size, sub-sector of belonging, year of birth; on the other, the implementation in specific cases of innovative technological frameworks in a disruptive sense, that are only noticeably manifested in recent years. This gives value to the methodology, purely qualitative, adopted in this study, well-knowing that it has undoubtedly some limitations. Practical implications – The agricultural context lends itself to studies that show that farmers and agrifood firms are very interested to explore in terms of border line technologies because of the significance of the sector for the economies of countries, the role of efficiency and potential optimization within the agrifood sector and the role that the sector plays in transitioning toward net zero targets. The chosen case studies highlight how the firms belonging to the Italian agrifood sectors have rethought and re-imagined the traditional ways of making innovation and to redesign processes that shape technology adoption within the agritech sector. Social implications – The research work presents the results of a study on green management with reference to the most relevant strategic decisions by companies, belonging in agrifood and the concomitant design by management of new relational governance systems in supply chain (the one to which they belong, the new one different from the one to which they belong, the radically new sector that help to create). We found that a significant number of firms in the agri-food sector are investing in company’s digital infrastructure design considering the importance of the necessary resources, which, in particular, are cultural and managerial for businesses in the sector, it is important, in the field of digital technology research, to focus on sectors that have proven to be consistent in terms of sustainable challenge (digital technology, R&D mode choices). Originality/value – New and unusual methods of doing research in house or seizing innovative opportunities in external contexts emerge. These new innovative phenomena can address calls for research on the era of restructuring the methods of innovation of the firms operating in the production chains or in actors belonging to “upstream” steps of the Italian agrifood supply chain (farmers, research agronomists, research institutes, etc.); furthermore, these new ways of innovating appear in the production chains to which they belong or in new production chains in which completely new players emerge (start-up, new actors of spin-offs phenomena, innovative hubs, etc.).