Unpacking smart farming innovation: A systematic literature review on technological change in agriculture

Technological change presents significant challenges for organizations and society and needs to be understood from a socio-technical perspective. Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) can play a crucial role in understanding disruptive change. Smart farming technologies (SFTs) are used as prime examples for disruption in a traditional industry. This paper shows how scholars can use TIM theories to contribute to a better understanding and subsequent recommendations for action. We review 973 articles using bibliographic coupling to synthesize existing literature. We identify the most prominent research themes and problematize the existing narratives in light of three theoretical approaches to technological change: evolutionary economics, social construction of technology, and actor-network theory. Finally, we present theory-driven questions for future research that indicate new directions for TIM. We comprehensively review and synthesize existing research at the intersection of smart farming technologies and the TIM domain, using bibliographic coupling to identify prominent research themes, highlight blind spots, and generate questions for future research. To counter the common shortcomings of systematic literature reviews in general (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2020) and trending automated literature reviews, we supplement our analysis with an extensive explorative-qualitative discussion of the results, linking our findings back to theory and deriving a comprehensive set of research questions for future research. We build upon Bruun and Hukkinens’ (2003) Integrative Framework for Studying Technological Change to guide our discussion and expand our critical review. Thus, we make three main contributions. First, we give a curated and comprehensive overview of articles on SFT and technological change to identify the theoretical deficiencies that lead to oversimplified assumptions regarding the dissemination of smart farming technologies. Second, we enrich the TIM literature by applying three established theories of technological change in a particular sector, making the connection between a specific domain of technological application (SFT) and established theories in the technology and innovation management field. Third, by detailing the extent to which the three theories help us understand the existing literature and discussing it in its entire complexity, we identify several blind spots of current research and derive research questions for future research in both, the SFT and the TIM field. This approach opposes a technology-deterministic and simplistic view of technological developments. By doing so, we aim to inspire TIM scholars to use theories that sharpen their understanding of the socio-technical system and the complexity of technological change. The article is structured as follows: we present the current state of smart farming adoption and diffusion, introduce the theoretical framework, describe the methodology employed for our bibliographic analysis, present the main results, discuss the identified research themes, and conclude with a summary and questions for future research.