Developing an innovation maturity framework for food industry

Abstract

This dissertation thoroughly investigated the current situation of food industry and emerging technologies. After reviewing the literatures on innovation maturity models, the author identified prominent food concepts and thirty food topics through conducting topic modeling using news articles texts, and then proposed a three-step Food Innovation Maturity Framework (F-IMF), and finally refined the framework by interviewing five insightful managers in food industry. Food businesses can use this framework as a self-testing instrument to assess nine dimensions of innovation capabilities, to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses of food innovation, and to locate their position on the five levels innovation maturity.