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The trend toward sustainability in business operations and practices in industry stimulated growing interest in research. Numerous recent studies examine the trend towards “green” products, processes and clean technologies and discuss the possibilities to exploit related business opportunities. Reaping the business opportunities appears to require integrating the two areas of sustainability and innovation not only in theory but also in business practices and require of companies to make changes internally as well as externally, in companies’ supply networks (e.g. Brindley & Lynn, 2015). Changing to more sustainable practices implies involvement of different parties and communication among these (Biggeman, Williams & Kro, 2014) and rearranging activities along with developing or recombining resources among different actors within the relevant business networks (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995). This paper focuses on the agri-food sector where sustainability concerns are diffused and lead to developing business practices also to comply with evolving European norms and regulations in the field. Societal, economic and technological changes impact the entire food processing chain, from agricultural production through food processing to the distribution to end consumers (Menrad, 2004). It has been observed that “the evolution of the agri-food system calls for a constant update of the corpus of knowledge in a continuous effort of interpreting and explaining observed behaviors in the industry” (Bonanno, 2017, p. 3). Although there is a considerable body of research on innovation in agri-food business, studies of how innovation for sustainability is actually carried out in this sector have been limited. Recent research argues that an ‘open innovation’ perspective is promising (Medeiros et al., 2016), but the research on the processes involved remains limited, even though it appears to hold significant promise of managerial and policy relevance. Therefore, this paper a

New business ventures have rather limited resources, generally suffer from liabilities of smallness and newness and rely on external business relationships, typically with suppliers, for developing and acquiring necessary resources. Yet, to date, research on how new ventures develop initial relationships with suppliers and how these affect the nascent business has been limited. Taking the business network perspective and relating it to studies of supply chain and supplier involvement in product development, our study contributes to the rather limited body of knowledge on new ventures' supplier relationships. Empirically, we draw on a longitudinal, in-depth single case study of the first two years of operation of a start-up. Our study shows that the development of the key initial supplier relationships starts from open-ended expectations of mutual future relational benefits and involves a stepwise ‘inter-definition’ of solutions in interaction between the parties. We observe that interdependences arise between the new venture and its key suppliers and these enable but also limit, the development paths of both partners. We argue that the key initial supplier relationships extend a new venture's resource and capability base and are an integral part of a new venture's business model.

La concezione di mercato, giusta o errata che sia, è importante perché orienta i comportamenti di vari attori di mercato e diventa pertanto un fattore decisivo per la performance di clienti e fornitori. La concezione dei mercati business-to-business, definiti come mercati dove i clienti sono aziende e altre organizzazioni, è spesso sfocata e le caratteristiche di questi mercati appaiono piuttosto diverse da come vengono presentate nella concezione generica di mercato proposta nei testi canonici di economia e management. In quanto consumatori e pertanto attori di mercato, abbiamo una conoscenza diretta del mercato e del suo funzionamento che può però essere fuorviante nell’approccio al mercato business-to-business che ha delle caratteristiche e un funzionamento piuttosto particolari. Le caratteristiche del mercato business-to-business riflettono le logiche e i comportamenti di acquisto dei ‘clienti business’ - aziende e altre organizzazioni - che si distinguono dai comportamenti di acquisto dei clienti consumatori per motivazioni e modalità di operare. Aziende, imprese ed altre organizzazioni, come clienti, si contraddistinguono per strutture e processi spesso inattesi e forse anche sorprendenti se approciati con la lente dei mercati dei beni di consumo. Le azioni ed i comportamenti basati su una concezione ‘canonica’ del mercato, che ci viene proposta nella teoria economica, tendono ad essere inefficaci e talvolta addirittura disfunzionali. È questa la ragione per cui in questo capitolo ci occuperemo dell’anatomia del mercato business-to-business e di una concezione di mercato volta a favorire un’efficace comprensione dei possibili meccanismi di azione.