Impact and Open Innovation opportunities in the agricultural sensor industry

As modern technologies are introduced to the market, products and services are systematically improved, business models and game rules are fundamentally altered, and innovation plays an increasingly important part in the dynamics of a company's growth, performance, and sustainable renewal. The paradigm of Open Innovation suggests a logic in which new ideas can come from multiple sources, not always within the classic organizational perimeters. A direct and continuous interaction with an expanded ecosystem of actors, including the academic community, startups, innovative SMEs, incubators, and the services' end users themselves, promotes the opening of the value creation process, which becomes a crucial tool for generating new business opportunities and contributes to the overall picture of technology transformation. The present thesis provides a broad overview of the innovative startups and young innovative SMEs operating in the sensor industry in Italy. Along with an estimation of the industry's sales, profits, and EBITDA, a vertical description of the industry will be given after the analysis of the samples data. The second portion of the thesis is on the agricultural industry, which is significantly defined by the usage of sensors. The use of sensors with other technologies enables the use of ad hoc techniques for cultivation of plants and care based on the characteristics of the land and the areas in which they are located, optimizing energy consumption and rationalizing resource use based on real-time weather conditions. Moreover, because the world's population is growing exponentially and there is an increasing demand for food, precision agriculture is becoming crucial to increase food productivity without increasing usage of key resources. There's the topic of supply chain traceability, which involves monitoring each stage of the manufacturing process and so ensuring product quality for the ultimate customer. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate through concrete examples that there are very interesting opportunities to apply innovation in the field of sensors to social and environmental sustainability, especially in the agricultural sector. In Open Innovation programs, cooperation between small enterprises and established businesses is essential for increasing the impact of these innovations.