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Top1. Introduction
In today’s turbulent business environment characterized by digitization, rapid changes, fast-changing of customer demands, exponential growth of technology, and increased interconnectedness, competition between organizations has shifted to competition between supply chains (Ketchen & Giunipero. 2004; Craighead et al., 2009; Bolivar-Ramos et al., 2012; Bhosale & Kant. 2016; Attia & Eldin. 2018). For supply chains to survive in the face of worldwide competitive rivalry and achieve superior performance, they must develop and promote their knowledge management (KM) capabilities that are congruent with the requirements of customers and markets and consistently improve their performance and competitive advantage (Weldy and Gillis. 2010; Argote and Miron-Spektor. 2011). However, it is extremely difficult for agri-food supply chain (AFSC) managers to promote their KM capabilities through learning new practices and technologies due to the involvement of different knowledge boundaries that hinder managers’ decision-making (Chen et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2019). A knowledge boundary is considered the border around the specialized knowledge domain of agents (Hawkins & Rezazade. 2012).
An AFSC is a complex system responsible for the circulation of agri-food products in a “farm-to-fork” sequence from the initial stage of production to the final stage of consumption (Luo et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2019). Additionally, stricter food quality standards, globalization, agro-sustainability, rapid industrialization of agricultural-based products, and increasing customer and government concerns over food safety have resulted in the AFSC activities becoming more complex (Zhao et al., 2020). From a process and value-adding perspective, an AFSC can be seen as a transformation system, which takes in inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, energy, and water to transform them to become desired agri-food products (Taylor and Fearne. 2006; Fischer. 2013; Dania et al., 2018). Important activities such as raw material supply, postharvest, testing, packaging, storage, distribution and marketing, are all necessary for the agri-food products’ transformation (Nakandala et al., 2017; Siddh et al., 2017). Nowadays, consumers are increasingly looking for high-quality organic agri-food products that are vitamin-rich, with high-protein and low-fat content and low pesticide contamination, which requires stakeholders in the AFSC to share and combine their knowledge, and further to transform their knowledge into products’ innovations (Corso et al., 2010; Cillo et al., 2019; Fait et al., 2019). Thus, KM capabilities such as exploring and exploiting available knowledge, identifying and overcoming knowledge boundaries, and sharing/transferring knowledge with AFSC stakeholders appear to be the necessary response to the continually changing and evolving customer requirements. However, most of the existing literature on supply chain KM focuses either on tools and practices that can facilitate KM in supply chains (Martin et al., 2008; Shih et al., 2012; Reyes et al., 2015) or on the barriers to the adoption of KM in supply chains (Sun & Scott, 2005; Patil & Kant, 2014; Batista et al., 2019). Only limited research has identified knowledge boundaries and corresponding boundary-spanning mechanisms in the context of AFSC (Marra et al., 2012; Cerchione & Esposito. 2016).