Entrepreneurial Skills of Farmers

The primary concern of the project is to recommend ways how conditions of the social, economic, political and cultural framework can be changed in order to facilitate the adoption of entrepreneurial skills for farmers and how farmers themselves can improve their entrepreneurial skills. The guiding idea comprises the persuasion that the kind of necessary entrepreneurial skills is strongly dependent on the strategic orientation of the farm.

Besides recommendations a diagnostic tool will be elaborated with which farmers can be positioned according to their entrepreneurial strategy and their entrepreneurial skills. This tool can be used by decision makers to evaluate and advise farmers to become more entrepreneurial, and farmers can assess themselves, learning their strengths and weaknesses concerning entrepreneurship.

Recommendations and the elaborated tool will be based on

1. an analytical definition and description of relevance of the concept of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills for agriculture reflecting the strategic orientations of farms: a segmentation model is developed, which provides the theoretical basis for the overall project and forms the basis for the diagnostic tool.
2. the specification of entrepreneurial skills in relation to the strategic orientation: This analysis will be conducted in case studies following a participatory approach with farmers and representatives of the socio-technical network of farmers.
3. the identification and analysis of the economic, social and cultural factors hindering and stimulating the development of entrepreneurial skills. Again, this analysis will be conducted in case studies and in a participatory way.

The results of the three analyses will be synthesised to strategies how to overcome barriers and improve stimulating factors for the development of entrepreneurial skills of farmers.