Innovative Business Model ‘Product Plus Service’ as Paradigm Innovation in Farming

This chapter begins with an introduction to the servitization phenomenon and discussions of why servitization should be considered a key paradigm innovation of the business model in the post-industrial stage of societal evolution. Later in the chapter, the focus is on why servitization is important for the development of farming. Literature shows that many previous assumptions on the needs of farmers identified by scholars in the last decades of the twentieth century are not valid. Despite the increase in income for all farms, no one wants to take over their work in the next generation and many farmers around the world now have no obvious successors. Neither children of farmers nor others find industrial farming an attractive profession (Bednaríková et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2014; Chiswell, 2018; Leonard et al., 2017; Morais, 2018). As pointed out by Milone and Ventura (2019, p. 43), “attracting people to farming demands a profound understanding of generational renewal”. According to empirical research, a new generation of farmers is emerging, who choose farming activities primarily according to their interests and preferred lifestyles. The new farmers go beyond the agricultural sector and want to make their mark on the evolution of rural areas by creating and developing a great variety of innovative land-based rural businesses. Most of them are shifting from a conventional agricultural product-driven farming business model to an innovative service-oriented business model called the ‘Product-Service System’ and are the main proponents and beneficiaries of introducing this innovation in rural communities.