The Innovation WG and Cooperatives WG are jointly organizing a webinar on March 22 5-6 pm CET :
Organising for Innovation: agricultural cooperatives and ICT (small farms, big data)
To attend the webinar please join us here: http://bit.ly/2tmzLfd . The link to access the webinar will be published there one hour before the start of the webinar.
This talk will consider the role of cooperatives as innovative organisational structures and as knowledge systems. Agriculture is one of the most complex and dynamic social-economic-technical sectors/systems, with an increasing important ecological and environmental goods aspect. The focus in this instance is on a dense community of small family farms in a fragile environment, their cooperatives, and their transition to a highly technical environment, all whilst maintaining the family farm social structure and the cooperative business model as a source of on-going innovation.
Since innovation does not occur in a vacuum, the field of organizational design looks to the relationship between organisational structures and innovation. Processes of learning and organizational knowledge creation are also important elements. Organizations with different structures may vary in both learning and knowledge creation, resulting in different innovative capabilities. The local cooperatives are considered in this regard.
Ostrom´s Social Ecological Systems (SES), blended with Social Technological Systems, and the resulting SETS, is the framework within which we consider the dynamics of this unique community of small yet highly intensive farming system, that holds tightly to its cooperatives, not out of nostalgia or lack of momentum, but rather as a business advantage.
About the speaker
Dr. Cynthia Giagnocavo Cátedra (Chair) Coexphal-UAL in Horticulture, Cooperative Studies and Sustainable Development, Faculty of Economics and Business Management, University of Almería, Spain. Her research focuses on the intersection of organisational, technical, social, economic and institutional innovation. She is currently involved in the internet of things in food and agriculture IoF2020 EU large scale project. Including the cooperative business form in digitization transition management and impact, and corresponding value chains, is a current concern.
President of the Board of International Co-operative Alliance European Research, she was also a member of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP-Agri) on Benchmarking of farm productivity and sustainability performance. She has participated in numerous European and international projects on entrepreneurship, the application of new technologies and digitization processes from a socio-economic perspective, policy and the diversity of business models. She is also involved in “bottom up” projects for cooperative founding and development, as well as cooperative governance and leadership. She is also a Barrister, Solicitor and attorney and has worked many years in the private sector in London and Madrid.