Does Market Orientation in Small-Scale farms pay off? A study of Innovation behaviour in Spanish agriculture

The paper underlines the importance of adopting a ‘market-orientation’ strategic approach in order to improve the performance of the firms, previously influenced by the ‘adoption of innovations’ of interest to the agricultural firms in two Spanish regions. The methodology selected has been a Multi-Group Structural Equation Modelling applied to the data obtained by personal interviews to a sample of farmers. Agricultural producers are more oriented, from the market point of view, to their regular customers and to controlling the quality of their production. The results also show a positive impact of market orientation activities on the performance to all firms