Identifying and analyzing the actors of Iran Agricultural Food Safety Innovation Network: Application of social network analysis approach

The growing global population has led the United Nations to predict that the world's population will increase from seven billion to eight billion by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. This population growth has increased the need for food supply. Also, the 20% increase in annual food consumption in the last decade has exacerbated the problem of insufficient food production, leading to maximum utilization of crops, fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and genetic modification to increase agricultural food production. This approach has led to environmental problems, ecosystem pollution, and more importantly, food pollution and food insecurity, and endangering human health and the occurrence of various diseases, poisonings, and cancers. One of the most important sources of competitive advantage in this way is the capacity for innovation, which, despite its great importance, its success requires access to new knowledge. Given the costly and time-consuming creation of new knowledge by a single organization and that not all the knowledge needed for innovation and intelligent, innovative, and creative people in an organization, using an innovation network consisting of various actors related to food safety is a suitable and helpful solution to use a maximum of knowledge to create innovation in this field. This research uses a qualitative-quantitative research method, snowball sampling method, and in-depth interviews with experts and experts in organizations/companies related to agricultural food safety to identify the food safety innovation network and design a questionnaire from the qualitative stage collecting information. Drawing relationships between actors and examining network indicators using UCINET software. The findings of this study identified 21 organizations as actors in this network. Eight actors, including the Food and Drug Administration, Food Industry Group, etc., were the main and central actors, and 13 other actors, including the Food and Drug Administration, Quality Control Laboratory of the Food and Drug Administration, etc., were peripheral activists.