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Metaorga PhD project (2024 - 2027)
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Metaorga PhD project (2024 - 2027)

Zero-pesticide and organising: identification and characterisation of place-based multi-stakeholder meta-organization business model

Research and innovation teams, both public and private, face major difficulties in deploying innovations in agro-ecological crop protection. The issue of deployment involves biotechnical and partnership issues, as well as public policy issues that go far beyond the scope of crop protection. Research teams would gain in efficiency in their innovation projects by integrating strategic thinking on business models at an early stage. Furthermore, most of the territories or players involved in agroecological approaches are far from R&I projects, particularly in the biocontrol innovation sector.

  • Duration and years : three years : 2024 - 2027
  • PhD student : Julien Mazza
  • Co-Funding : Acropics project

Background and challenges

The notion of meta-organization (MO) was first used by Ahrne and Brunsson in 2005. MOs are “organizations whose members are organizations rather than individuals, and lie at the intersection of sociology and management sciences” (Berkowitz & Dumez, 2015). In the agricultural field, there are a large number of MOs coexisting at different territorial scales (from cooperatives and CUMAs to upstream industrial syndicates such as IBMA/AFAIA/UNIFA). The establishment of today's dominant agricultural system has been concomitant with the creation of meta-organizations and associated governance structures. We therefore hypothesize that the deployment of agroecological systems will be structured through new forms of organization: from multi-stakeholder territorial meta-organizations to innovative business models. 

Objectives 

The aim of the thesis is to determine the structuring characteristics of meta-organization business model innovations for the deployment of place-based agroecological crop protection initiatives.
The approach is the abductive study of diversified cases of territorialized zero-pesticide farming initiatives, with a view to developing generic knowledge on ways of structuring innovative business models enabling the development of agroecological crop protection and sustainable socio-economic activity.

Involved research units for supervision:

Research unitScientific divisionField of expertiseRole
Institut Sophia AgrobiotechSPEPopulation ecologyCoordination and guidance on biological control

Partners

Research unitScientific divisionField of expertiseRole
GredegUniversité Côte d'AzurInnovation managementTheoretical coordination and management sciences

Contacts / coordination :

Modification date: 03 October 2024 | Publication date: 31 July 2024 | By: Fabien HALKETT