How to Successfully Orchestrate Content for Digital Agriecosystems

Abstract

Since the 2000s, digital ecosystems have been affecting markets—Facebook and Uber being prominent examples. Looking at the agrisector, however, there is not yet a winner-takes-all solution in place. Instead, numerous digital agriplatforms have emerged, many of which have already failed. In the context of this study, it was revealed that reasons for such failures can be manifold, with one key challenge being the orchestration of platform content. Because, however, publicly available knowledge on this regard is limited, we decided to introduce a methodology for the evaluation of digital agriecosystem services, enabling providers to optimize their existing offering and to prioritize new services prior to implementation. By deploying our methodology to digital agriecosystems with two different application focuses (DairyChainEnergy—data agriecosystem on energy management for dairy farmers, and NEVONEX—IoT agriecosystem comprising digital services for agrimachinery), its applicability was proven. Providers of digital agriecosystems will benefit from applying this new methodology because they receive a structured decision-making process, which takes the most relevant success criteria (e.g., customer benefit, technical feasibility, and resilience) into account. Hence, a resulting prioritization of digital agriservices will guide providers in making the right implementation choices in order to successfully generate network effects on their digital agriecosystems.