The role of inter-personal and inter-organisational communication in value chain innovation

The globalisation and liberalisation of world trade has facilitated the recent rise to dominance of world agrifood markets by large supermarket chains. Rather than competing on price they are driven by the need to create ‘value’ in the eyes of consumers through highly segmented products and services. Thus innovation, and in particular the co-innovation that occurs at the interfaces between firms, is at the heart of contemporary corporate strategy and has shifted the locus of competition from individual firms to value chains. Previous studies have indicated that communication and relationships are significantly correlated with the level of innovation and this is a deficiency of many Australian agrifood chains. This paper reports the early results of on-going research at the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research, which aims to develop a research methodology for benchmarking the co-innovation capacity of organisations in vertically co-ordinated value chains.