FM - Business Management & Marketing

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Browsing FM - Business Management & Marketing by Subject "Agriculture 4.0"

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    Assesing Romanian farmers’ motivation for digitalization: a Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) based research model
    (University of Oradea, Faculty of Economic Sciences, 2024-03-15) Markovits, Paul Ștefan
    The digital agriculture adoption strive by farmers could be assimilated with the adoption efforts of the computer technologies (ICT) by their respective users in other professional fields. Therefore, this paper proposes the adaptation of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) model to explore the motivations for the use of digital tools by field crop farmers in Romania. The history of TAM and UTAUT is explored as well as the usage of UTAUT2 and UTAUT3 in digital agriculture adoption studies globally. Furthermore, comparison is also made with other farmer studies based on a different research architecture conceived also to explore their motivations to use digital agriculture tools. The proposed model is building on the decades long research and validation of the UTAUT model, and it will be employed in subsequent quantitative studies to evaluate the Romanian farmers’ motivations to embrace the digital agriculture technologies and practices. The paper is the outcome of the individual research done by the author and it was enhanced following academic debates and conference presentations. It is deemed to have a dual applicability, as a field tool for academic research but also provides guidance for companies developing digital tools for farmers in Romania and beyond.
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    Digital transformation of agriculture in Romania : a change management perspective
    (Universitatea „Ovidius” din Constanța, 2023) Markovits, Paul Ștefan
    The purpose of this paper is to further strengthen the belief within the academic, professional and policy making communities about the need to speed up the adoption of Agriculture 4.0 technologies in the Romanian farms as the grassroot constituents of the national agriculture in order to secure their future competitiveness in the context of new European agricultural policies and regulations. A review of the most influential papers and the bibliometric mapping of articles on change management as well as ways to accelerate change processes through change agents is discussed. Agrinnovator is the think tank of young digital agriculture practitioners in the Romanian farms. Their public policy proposal to create The Farm Technology Officers Program in order to accelerate digitalization through relevant change agents is also discussed. Their interviews highlighted the need for government support in creating scale and impetus for the digitalization of agriculture. It is deemed to be a structural countrywide change that will happen faster if the adequate change agents are used.
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    Digitally enabled decision making in big crop farms : inspiration for a balanced decision making : metaphorical model
    (Sciendo, 2023-07-14) Markovits, Paul Ștefan
    This paper analysis decision making support systems in the big crops farms and proposes a metaphoric model to illustrate the interdependence of resources usage. The proposed metaphoric model is drawn considering that six types of resources (time, financial, people, knowledge, technology, relational capital) are spent to achieve an objective and puts forward a graphical representation, a hexagonal pyramid to illustrate the interdependence among these six types of resources (the polygon of resources) and the quality of the financial outcome (the height of the pyramid). Examples of digital decision support systems used in big crop farms were used to explain the model’s functioning. A particularity of the model consists in the adding of a second mirrored pyramid (resting on the same base) with its height representing the assessment of the environmental impact as a proxy for ESG results. Consequently, the evolved model proposed by the paper, dubbed as The Value Creation Diamond, provides a good springboard in visualizing and assessing the balance between the scaled heights of the two adjoined pyramids (Financial height vs ESG height). The model is deemed to be a useful tool for practitioners as well as educators in their quest to facilitate the wider use of balanced decision-making model considering the resources and outputs in the realm of sustainable development. Further research will be instrumental to validate the possibility to use this model for other types of farms, firms and organizations.
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    Up-skilling and re-skilling for digital agriculture in Romanian big crop farms : exploratory considerations
    (Tritonic, 2022) Markovits, Paul Ștefan
    The purpose of this paper is to elevate the interest in the academic, professional and policy making circles to the need of a large-scale re-skilling and up-skilling effort for the management and the workforce in the Romanian farms in light of the large-scale deployment of the Agriculture 4.0 technologies. The Romanian agricultural sector is a major contributor to the EU agricultural output and the aim of such an effort would be to secure and enhance its competitiveness by future proofing the performance and sustainability of the Romanian farms in the context of yield growth imperative, sustainable exploitation of land and water resources and efficient and fast decision making enabled by digitalization. A review of the most influential papers and the bibliometric mapping (using VOSviewer) of Web of Science articles on digital agriculture was enriched with several expert interviews with executives involved in the deployment of digital technologies to Romanian farmers. The literature review illustrated that like in the case of Industry 4.0, Agriculture 4.0 requires training and deployment of new skills. Expert interviews added extra perspectives coming from practitioners and highlighted the fact that these new skills are needed at all levels of work happening in the farm. The digitalization of the agriculture is a structural change that will happen even if adoption rates seem still slow and it will affect all actors in the farm from owners/managers to operators giving a very important role to agricultural experts, engineers, and financial planners. It is the hope of this article to bring an academic support to the conversation about the skills needed for Agriculture 4.0 and induce operationalization of large scale grassroot activities needed for the migration of today’s agricultural practitioners to digital technologies.