The Inclusiveness of Internet-based Agri-business Innovation System: A Case Study on Alibaba

Compared to the economic effect, the social effect brought by innovation remains ignored by scholars. Inclusive innovation, which emphasizes the diversity of the stakeholders related to innovations, especially BOPs (the bottom of the pyramid) has been acknowledged as a possible solution to series of social problems such as imbalanced development and poverty. However, how innovation system achieve inclusiveness is still not clearly explained in existing research. From 2013, "Taobao villages", where many farmers from rural area are enabled to get free from poverty by doing agri-business online, become prevailing under the development of ICT infrastructure and the Alibaba group's rural e-business strategy. Such internet-based businesses catalyzed by Alibaba's innovation on e-business platform, lower the entry barrier for transaction, more easily connects farmers to huge market and provide them opportunity to participate in value creation activity. As a result, such group benefit from such way of sharing the value with other participators. We develop our research on case studies of several "Taobao villages" in China. We attempt to draw implications from the performance of the innovation system which include multiple innovators for the mechanism that reduce social exclusions and enabled farmers participate in value creation activity.