Food supply chain from an entrepreneur's perspective has many needs today. To cultivate food entrepreneurs addressing the growing global demand in food, there is an emerging trend in integrating vital players in food supply chain to form food clusters. Like most of start-up entrepreneurs in other industries, food entrepreneurs have their challenges of identifying market opportunities, building a trusted management team, and securing funding sources to run the businesses. They also need facilities to produce their foods, the facilities needed to be certified by local food authorities, securing product liability insurance, and marketing channels to distribute their food products. In this paper, we discussed how LSU Food Incubator is established and developed to address those challenges. Specifically, it is a “Flying High, Landing Soft” platform. We plan to empower the platform with mobile cloud learning practices and capabilities and extend this platform to emerging markets like Turkey.
TopIntroduction
Food supply chain has been an important research topic in global supply chain management. Early literature focused on (1) “farm to fork” (Bourlakis and Weightman, 2004), including consumer (Brom, 2000), risk & safety (Yeung and Morris, 2001), procurement (Stiner, 1991) & third party logistics (Selviaridis and Spring, 2007), livestock systems (McMichael, et al, 2007) & crop production (Oerke, et al, 2012), food manufacturers (Mercer and Tao, 1996) organic foods (Magnusson, 2001), retailing (Cotterill and Mueller, 1979) & supermarket supply networks (Duffy and Fearne, 2004), wholesaling (Dawson, 2004), and catering (Macrae, et al, 1993); and globalization of food supply chain and its management (Eastham, et al, 2007), including diversity of partnerships for quality assurance (Willem and Trienekens, 1999) and traceability of global networks of food supply (Barrett, et al., 1999).
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged later as a research focus in the global food supply chain, including motivations in CSR engagement (Piacentini, et al, 2000), the global evolution of the food supply chains and their role in rural economy development (Marsden, et al, 2000), reputation for quality and reliability (McWilliams and Siegel, 2001), general food supply chain CSR issues and solutions (Maloni and Brown, 2006), potential and limits (Vogel, 2006), CSR within food stores (Jones, et al., 2007), impact on consumer trust (Pivato, et al, 2008), CSR drivers including economy, environment, and society (Hartmann, 2011), CSR in emerging markets (Kong, 2012), cross-cultural comparison (Loose and Remaud, 2013); and Nutrition Information Disclosure (Ye, et al, 2014).
More recent research focus of food supply chain management consists of addressing growing global issues (Pullman and Wu, 2012) such as (1) food waste and sustainability (Leal Filho and Kovaleva, 2014), including food waste valorized through different technologies (Vandermeersch, et al, 2014), design for sustainability through social practice approaches (Niimi, et al, 2014), and prevention by reducing food surplus throughout the food supply chain. (Papargyropoulou, et al, 2014); (2) food safety (Wallace, et al, 2011; Bhat and Gomez-Lopez, 2014), including managed through assurance systems (Zwietering, et al, 2014) and achieving food safety by using nanotechnology tools (Ayala‐Zavala, et al, 2014); (3) food security (Woertz, 2013), including using sustainable intensification strategies (Godfray and Garnett, 2014); and (4) climate change (Paloviita and Järvelä, 2015), including impacts on food availability (Shackleton, 2014) and threat to future global food security (Tai, et al, 2014). Global entrepreneurship in food supply chain is believed to be an effective solution to address the growing global issues (Tripathi and Agarwal, 2014; Kline, et al, 2014).