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Purpose Circumstances that are have a significant impact on it. In particular, environmental sustainability related to the increase of worldwide population, and market demand for agricultural products (with consumers more and more aware about cultivation and breeding techniques and interested in healthy and high-quality products) represent two of the key challenges that the agricultural sector is going to face in next years. In such a landscape, technological innovations that can support organizations and entrepreneurs to face these problems become increasingly important, and Industry 4.0 is the most striking example. Indeed, the Industry 4.0 paradigm aims to integrate digital technologies into business processes to raise productivity levels and to develop new business models. Accordingly, digital technologies play a similar role in the precision agriculture domain, and the purpose of this paper is to understand if the technologies at the basis of these two paradigms are the same or not. Design/methodology/approach The present work investigates how the two domains of Industry 4.0 and precision agriculture are connected to one another by analyzing the most used technologies in both the fields in order to highlight common patterns and technological overlaps. To reach such goal, an approach combining manual and automated analysis was developed. Findings The research work generated three main results: a dictionary of precision agriculture technologies including 324 terms; a graph, describing the connections between the technologies composing the dictionary; and a representation of the main technological clusters identified. Originality/value These show how the two domains under analysis are directly connected and describe the most important technologies to leverage when approaching digital transformation processes in the agricultural sector.

Despite the accelerated dynamics of the environment, higher education institutions slowly update their curricula in entrepreneurship education according to global challenges and market needs. Moreover, knowledge and good practice exchanges between educators of futures studies, business representatives, and academics is limited. This article aims to present a methodology for prototyping an online course for individuals to become more future-oriented in their professional and personal settings. The main research problems tackled by the authors relate to: 1) the identification of competences that would help academics, entrepreneurs, and students to deal with uncertainty and to 2) convey the competences to the target groups through learning topics selected from futures studies and the entrepreneurship repertoire. The authors of the article undertook and coordinated theoretical and empirical research on foresight and Futures Literacy and its correspondence with entrepreneurship within the beFORE project funded under the Erasmus+ program’s Knowledge Alliance scheme. The research process resulted in the identification of 12 key competence items and the development of a free, approximately 34-hour-long online course consisting of seven self-standing modules, 25 lessons, and 79 learning topics corresponding to these competences. The originality of the paper is in its contribution to the discussion on the competences and online course content that efficiently increase the capacities of using the future(s) in professional, academic, and personal settings.

According to a recent Accenture survey, "Stepping off the crazy train" (2017), a total of 80% of companies still use an outdated approach to innovation, based on incremental tweaking (Holman et al., 2017). The empirical analysis showed that, in the Italian food sector, innovation adoption follows different patterns when product or process innovation is considered.On the other hand, Capitanio et al. (2009) show how the probability of introducing product innovation is influenced by the quality of human capital, the geographical context and, to a lesser extent, the company age.The more a sector is characterized by the presence of small or medium enterprises (SMEs), and so by a poor internal availability of qualified competences and capitals to invest, the more the innovation comes from outside. Indeed, SMEs are not normally able to generate innovations and are therefore willing to adopt them by borrowing from other sectors, which might present different characteristics. Consequently, these innovations often have to be readjusted, as they have been conceived for different scopes and applications at the moment of their development.Thanks to the economic growth in Italy, companies such as Ferrero, Barilla and Parmalat have established themselves as major business centres in the development of innovation, and were capable of driving the entire context characterized by the presence of SMEs. Cooperation is particularly important for innovation in the food industry, which is traditionally considered a "low technology" sector (Trott and Simms, 2017).Nowadays, the food industry is facing technical and economic changes of society, manufacture and food processing that affect the whole supply-chain. This fact forced companies to pay great attention in food products, in order to meet the consumer's demand for a healthier lifestyle. As a consequence, innovation in the food industry does not only appear as an opportunity, but also as a prerequisite to stand out from the competition, apply specific pricing policies, penetrate new markets and ensure sustainability of the food sector (Galanakis, 2016).

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