Food Chain Innovation: Reviewing 35 Use Cases to Identify Business Model Success Patterns

A team of 8 organisations from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands and Turkey supported over 40 teams and preferably startups to realise food chain innovations. Over a period of 2 years, a programme was developed and realised to select and support teams from the ideation to the commercialisation phase. The teams were usually working in close collaboration with a business partner, were supported in the usage of reusable software components for Internet based solutions and got direct assistance to address potential customers especially in the area of fruit and vegetables. Embedded in a larger initiative with use cases from different business domains, a set of metrics was developed to assess the teams and solutions that were characterised by different maturity levels, size and market potentials. The objective was to rank the teams for being able to focus support on the best performing solutions. Subsequently, it was discussed, if there are potential success patterns that could help to assess team performance at an earlier stage and possibly facilitate the forecasting of potential investment risks at an earlier stage. Finally, the objective is to use those results for being able to analyse and technologically assist future use cases that are currently set-up in the scope of a Large Scale Pilot initiative. The objective is to use the results for facilitating future selection of food chain innovations that could complement the set of 19 use cases currently being developed.