U.S. Agribusiness companies and product innovation: Insights from a choice experiment conducted with agribusiness executives

Product innovation generates short and long-term growth by attracting new customers while satisfying existing customers. This paper identifies factors influencing the selection of innovation projects and quantifies the tradeoffs which agribusiness managers make when selecting product innovations. A choice experiment approach is used to provide insight into agribusiness executive behavior. Our results indicate that executives prefer (in decreasing order of importance) projects with low risk of technical/regulatory failure, low relative market risk, short-term to market, in-house capability, and high sunk costs. Our results suggest that policy makers could stimulate open innovation with programs such as government sponsored research and cost-sharing.