Stakeholders’ Collaboration on Innovation in Food Industry

In the dynamic economic environment where knowledge is vastly distributed companies can no longer rely on their own research and are pushed to utilize outside sources to sustain growth. At the same time food industry involves large number of horizontal and vertical relationships, the very dynamic nature of these relationships play role in innovation. The primary purpose of the research is to study interactions and relations between stakeholders in food industry, particularly in Sweden, to gain an understanding of the driving forces for development in food processing and packaging technologies. Also gain insight into the innovation process at major Packaging solution provider (PSP) and Process equipment manufacturers (PEM), their interaction, collaboration and information sharing with food manufacturing companies (FMC). Study shows the views of industry experts strongly reflect that the role of suppliers of processing and packaging in food industry is “contractual” in nature, whereas ingredient suppliers tend to be more mature partners in the innovation process. The innovation process at major food machinery and packaging companies corresponds well to the ‘food-machinery framework’ of open innovation (Bigliardi et al., 2010). It is apparent that food industry is taking steps to integrate external knowledge sources in the innovation process, still suppliers continues to play limited strategic role in innovation. This study shows that some barriers to collaboration were identified and they can be grouped into two types: technical and perspective. Technical factors constitute lack of technical expertise amongst food manufacturer, requirement for legal framework and difficulty in predicting future needs.