Taking the hope and fear out of agricultural service innovation

Agriculture lags other sectors in the development and uptake of digital services needed for safe and sustainable food production. Challenges to digital readiness include Internet connectivity in rural areas. Whilst connectivity solutions are emerging, two key enablers of digital service innovation are lacking and often overlooked. The first is the absence of reliable underpinning information systems calibrated for decision-making (knowledge infrastructure) to enable services to be scaled and repurposed for different use-cases. Progress is being made in the development of such systems which will attract new investment and open many transformational opportunities across the food and agriculture ecosystem. The second relates to the maturity of contemporary lean startup approaches to iterative co-design and market validation prevalent in the sector. These methods place the customer or service consumer at the centre of a co-creation process to ensure that value is delivered and ultimately adoption is maximised. This is particularly relevant for agriculture in both advanced economies and developing countries characterised by a highly complex and volatile decision-making context. Designed and executed well, this approach to deliberate service innovation removes the hope and fear elements more commonly experienced.