USA
August 1, 2011
by Rod Conner, President/CEO, AgGateway
“It is the long history of humankind… those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin
There is little doubt that businesses in today’s hyper-connected, information driven, social media enabled, globally influenced business environment must be both innovative and flexible across their entire operation if they want to succeed. Successful innovative companies often cite a collaborative environment as one of the primary factors that enables them to achieve innovation. Paul Adler, professor of management and communication at the University of Southern California asserts that, “The organizations that will become the household names of this century will be renowned for sustained, large scale efficient innovation. The key to that capability is … a strong collaborative community.” Adler is primarily talking about collaboration within organizations, but his premise is equally applicable to groups of businesses as well.
Although agriculture has a long history of independence, competition and self-reliance, a strong sense of community and collaboration has been equally apparent. It comes as no surprise then, that an organization focused on collaboration and innovation, as AgGateway is, would sprout-up in the ag community. AgGateway’s founding companies and members that have joined more recently have come to recognize that the path to innovation, and a more efficient and effective business, is through collaboration.
Think for a moment about the increased efficiencies and innovations our members who collaborated in the Accelerated Electronic Connectivity, Crop Nutrition Connectivity, Seed Connectivity and other projects have experienced. Although many have made big improvements in how they conduct business, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. The opportunities for innovations through industry collaboration are virtually limitless. Seizing those opportunities will lead to greater business sustainability, and will also help agriculture thrive.
One of the more recent signs of AgGateway style collaboration was on display at the InfoAg Conference in Springfield, Illinois. Many of our Precision Ag Council members were involved in the conference. During the week, I had the opportunity to speak with most of them. In every conversation, I heard passion and enthusiasm for what they believe can be accomplished through collaboration.
Paul Schrimpf, in his July 14th blog posting InfoAg 2011 a Kumbaya Moment writes, “…. Finally, while I admit I was skeptical about the industry’s stomach for sitting around a table and hammering out precision agriculture standards, I was pleased to see how many companies displayed statuettes in their booths indicating their membership in the AgGateway standards program. And it wasn’t just window dressing – I asked several companies about it, and almost without fail the response came back: ‘I really think the industry can do this.’ They have me believing it too.”
In reality, it’s not an AgGateway standards “program”, or an AgGateway project, or even the eBusiness technology itself that’s at the core of our success. It’s the collaboration in the industry that makes all those things work. AgGateway is a group of diverse dedicated people organized around a sense of shared purpose to meet the challenges of their individual companies – even more – the challenges facing agriculture in the future.
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