New Entrant netWork: Business models for Innovation, entrepreneurship and resilience in European agriculture
The NEWBIE network will facilitate the development and dissemination of new business models, including new entry models, to the full range of new entrants – from successors to complete newcomers to the agricultural sector.
The NEWBIE network offers a unique platform by bringing together new entrants, successors, advisors, researchers, important regional and national actors and relevant stakeholders in national networks.
Who are ‘new entrants’?
New entrants are defined in the NEWBIE network as anyone who starts a new farm business or becomes involved in an existing farm business. They comprise a wide range of ages, agricultural experience and resource access. Newcomers and successors can enter farming at any stage in their working lives. They face common barriers: access to land, labour, capital, housing, markets, knowledge and the networks needed to acquire these resources.
What are ‘business models’?
Business models or entrepreneurial models describe the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value, represent the design of organizational structures to enact a commercial opportunity and explain how value is created for the customers and how value is captured for the company and its stakeholders. Individual business models are often oriented on one or on a mix of business strategies like “low cost production”, “differentiation” or “diversification”.
What are ‘entry models’?
New entry models are here defined as approaches, methods and/or instruments, which can help to overcome resource access barriers for new entrants in farming. These can be, for example, new forms of farm cooperation between landowners and new entrepreneurs like partnerships including junior-senior-partnerships, contract farming, share farming, or land access with support by an incubator institution. New entry models can specifically address the issue of access to “key resources” and the juridical aspects of a new business, and present a quite important and decisive part of a business model of a new farming operation.