SOCIAL INNOVATION AS AN INCENTIVE FOR THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF AGRI-FOOD COMPANIES IN CEE

Abstract

The managers/owners of the agri-food producing companies located in remote rural areas, with limited knowledge and resources for new technologies cannot benefit from the increased performance and competitiveness that the Agriculture 4.0. offers. Meanwhile, those managers/owners often keep very close relationship with their employees and need social incentives to digitally transform. The interrelationship between social innovation and digitalisation is still under researched. The aim of this paper is to assess if technology-based social innovation could enhance the transition towards Agriculture 4.0. of agri-food manufacturing SMEs in Central and Eastern Europe. The methods include factor analysis with data from a recent survey on digitalisation collected among 169 owners/from six countries (Bulgaria, Serbia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), comprising three sectors – Food Manufacturing Sector (transforming foodstuff into ingredients), Product Manufacturing (preservation of products or their transformation, agri-food companies are also included) and other industries (without food). Then cluster analysis is performed to analyse the sociodemographic characteristics of those sectors. The results demonstrate that agri-food companies in Eastern Europe are more sensitive to social innovation as a factor for their digital transformation.