Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

I have been working on technical change in agriculture for over 25 years with a specific focus on environment. Recent excitement about datafication in agriculture – and my leadership role in Cornell’s Institute for Digital Agriculture – combined with emergence of venture capital’s interest in agriculture led me to initiate a study focused on innovation intermediaries (incubators, accelerators, prize competitions, and hands-on early stage investors). My focus on intermediaries arises from recognition that innovations that have a strong public goods dimension – climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, pesticide reductions, water conservation, etc.. – are likely to require special assistance to “get to market” and”scale”. Following this logic, we have focused efforts on building relations with “mission-driven” agtech innovation intermediaries; organizations that aim to advance socio-ecological problem solving as part of their efforts to support innovation. To put it bluntly, if we find that these organizations are not able to meaningfully support innovations linked to socioecological problem solving, we must look beyond agtech to advance sustainable agrifood.

Our research is premised on a sense that commercial relations and socioecological problem solving are not fully compatible. Clearly there is a class of socioecological problems where firms’ interest in efficiency and risk management produce incentives to invest in conservation. But there is also a class of problems where such incentives are quite weak (i.e., public goods such as climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation). In this sense, mission-driven agtech innovation intermediaries are swimming upstream. So, I engage skeptically, but respectfully. This respect is partly informed by a pragmatic commitment to examine the full range of responses to accelerating socioecological problems.

This research – and the opportunity to engage in a sustained way with practitioners – presents an opportunity for me to better understand the political economy of agrifood, environmental governance, and contemporary capitalism. And at the same time this work positions me to try to make practical contributions to sustainability transitions.

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

We are studying the innovation management routines/practices of innovation intermediaries. We are inventorying and assessing their approaches for defining, assessing, measuring and communicating social and environmental impact. In this sense, our engagement here is quite meta (i.e., we are studying how the actors engage rather than engaging personally).

We focus on assessment/measurement because we identify some validity to the claim that “you cannot manage what you do not measure”. We want to know how important sustainability attributes are in actors’ decisions regarding allocation of capital and mentoring capacity. We also want to know if sustainability credentials/evidence represents valuable currency in agtech innovation ecosystems.

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

Excerpt from Stephens, Phoebe and S. Wolf. 2023. Agritech entrepreneurship, innovation intermediaries, and sustainability transitions: A critical analysis. Journal of Innovation Economics and Management. https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-of-innovation-economics-2023-0-page-I145.htm

“Given issues of incentives and organizational constraints, we identify a risk of mission-drift. Mission-drift occurs when an organization loses focus on their original values and goals and develops a new orientation that has important consequences for outputs and outcomes. The concept of mission-drift is well-established in the subfield of microfinance but less so in the social innovation and sustainability transitions literatures. Microfinance institutions emerged to provide financial services to poor, underserved clients to support poverty alleviation based on a self-sustaining business model. Scholars have documented that in the last two decades, micro-finance institutions have shifted attention from social performance to financial performance, and they have reoriented their services toward wealthier population segments (Bhuiyan et al., 2020; Mersland, Strom, 2010). Given this example and our general argument that the rigors of finance and the challenges of sustainability are not easily aligned, we are interested in how mission-drift may emerge in entrepreneurial ecosystems that express commitments to sustainability.

We identify potential for economic objectives, assessment criteria and accountability controls to crowd out social considerations within mission-oriented intermediaries. We surmise that metrics and accountability mechanisms may help to buffer against mission-drift by ensuring that social enterprises, and the intermediaries supporting them, maintain their commitments to sustainability objectives. However, managing and measuring for social impact must be approached in a critical, reflexive manner to avoid entrenching practices that project a perception of impact rather than tangible results for communities and ecosystems (Ferguson, 1990; Konefal et al., 2022).” (p5-6)