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Top1. Introduction
Thailand has been recognized as an agricultural country. The food industry (FI) is one of the most prominent drivers for the Thai economy. In 2019, Thailand was ranked the 11th most significant food products exporter in the world. The Thai Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (OSMEP, 2020) reports that food products exported from Thailand are mostly primary and raw in nature. However, products are recently more frequently found in the form of ready-to-eat (RTE) food products. The proportion of RTE foods to freshly produced foods was 35:65 in 1988 but was increased to 50:50 in 2016. This moderately increasing ratio suggests that new product development (NPD) and food technologies have high levels of participation in this industry.
The FI transforms the agricultural raw materials with various manufacturing technologies to prolong the shelf-life of food products (OSMEP, 2020). Hence, food manufacturing/machinery SMEs are critical actors in this industry. However, academic literature has underestimated its importance.
Thai food machinery SMEs face various challenges to survive their fast-changing environment with limited resources, for example, meeting evolved customer demands and greater compliance with national regulation’s complexity. Therefore, most innovative food NPD are initiated in large and multinational companies. This situation contrasts with countries like Italy where innovation is handled mostly by SMEs (De Martino & Magnotti, 2018). Moreover, Thai food NPD shows a 70-80% failure rate (Hongsaprabhas et al., 2018). Along the NPD process, failures can take place at any stage: being unable to pass the laboratory scale, being unable to reach mass production, and being unable to pass the food registration procedure. These failures have prevented new products achieving the legal commercialized requirement.
As such, Thai food machinery SMEs often avoid investing in research and development (R&D), but focus on production and marketing. Only a minority is actually investing in NPD. Since 2017, Thai government support for FI SMEs and investment in OI development to improve their success ratio. Therefore, some Thai food machinery SMEs collaborate increasingly with other actors within and outside the FI, and adopt implicitly open innovation (OI) logics and practices (Jones & Pimdee, 2017). Although the literature already reported this evolution (Bigliardi, 2019), it never enters the black box of OI implementation at the SME level in the FI. This critical research gap hinders the possibility of understanding what types of OI logics and practices are most frequently adopted in food NPD and why.