Sustainability of Small-Scale Knowledge-Intensive Enterprises in the Agricultural Sector: a Focus on Sustainable Innovators

The present study aims to explore the factors underpinning the sustainability of small-scale knowledge-intensive enterprises operating in the agricultural sector. The research is an applied study in terms of objective and a descriptive survey in terms of data collection. The small-scale knowledge-intensive enterprises were selected from five groups: agricultural machinery, medicinal herb production, animal farming, aquatic animal farming, and biotechnology. The sample was taken by multistage clustering with proportional allocation. Data were collected with a self-designed questionnaire from the managers and board members of small-scale knowledge-intensive enterprises, and the factors underpinning the sustainability of the enterprises were determined by the ordinal logit method. The sustainability of small-scale knowledge-intensive agricultural enterprises was considered the dependent variable as a mix of the variable of the change in capital, sale, and employment. According to the results, the main factors underpinning the sustainability of the small-scale knowledge-intensive agricultural enterprises included the number of educational courses, the number of constituting people, teamwork and cooperation morale, market availability, the use of social networks, manager’s job experience, and the extent of reliance on imported equipment and technology. We, therefore, contribute to understanding the sustainability of small-scale knowledge-intensive enterprises in the agricultural sector by asking individuals making up the agricultural entrepreneurship ecosystem how they perceive main factors can better enable sustainable ventures to thrive and play a role in sustainable transitions.