AgTech companies are being urged to rethink how they scale, with new research suggesting that the industry’s biggest growth barriers are frequently social, organisational and institutional rather than technical.
A paper published in Agricultural Systems by Jorge Fernández-Vidal, a researcher at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and managing director at the Liechtenstein Group, argues that agricultural technology ventures should move beyond a simple “scale fast” mindset and instead focus on learning through the challenges encountered in different markets.
New model challenges conventional scaling wisdom
Rather than treating implementation difficulties as obstacles to overcome, the paper suggests these points of “friction” often generate valuable insights that help companies adapt products, business models and go-to-market strategies to local conditions.
The study concludes that successful scaling depends not only on technological innovation but also on building trust between technology providers, farmers, advisers, supply-chain partners and policymakers. Technologies that perform well in trials can still fail commercially if they do not fit local practices, regulatory frameworks or farmer priorities.
Scaling learning, not products
One of the paper’s central arguments is that successful agtech companies are not necessarily scaling products as much as they are scaling their capacity to learn.
Asked whether such a model risks making growth dependent on chance rather than deliberate strategy, Fernández-Vidal told AgNavigator that the companies he studied were highly systematic in how they approached learning.
“I don’t think successful agtech scaling is based on luck,” he said. “The key is that they stop treating every new market as a place to sell the same product and instead treat it as a place to learn.”
According to Fernández-Vidal, the most successful companies develop organisational routines that make learning repeatable. These include running pilots, involving farmers early in product development, documenting failures and creating feedback loops between field teams and headquarters.
“The product may change from one country to another, but the process of learning becomes standardized,” he said. “That is what makes scaling manageable rather than dependent on chance.”
From global standardisation to global learning
The research also challenges the assumption that successful international growth requires standardising products and business models across markets.
Fernández-Vidal said one of the most surprising findings was that top-performing agtech companies do not simply collect more data – they create systems that capture and institutionalise local experience.
“For example, they involve farmers in product design, give local teams enough autonomy to adapt solutions, and regularly bring together teams from different countries to compare what they are learning,” he explained.
Rather than asking how every market can be made to look the same, these companies focus on identifying patterns across different environments.
The result is what Fernández-Vidal describes as a “global learning system” rather than a global standardisation system.
Technology platforms, underlying science and core products often remain largely unchanged, he noted, while pricing, partnerships, distribution models, user experience and some product features are adapted to local circumstances.
The rise of ‘context-responsive scaling’
At the heart of the paper is a concept Fernández-Vidal calls “context-responsive scaling.”
The challenge of scaling locally tailored solutions without sacrificing a coherent global model is “probably the central tension in agtech”, he said.
“A solution becomes scalable when the company understands which parts of the business are universal and which parts should always remain local.”
He warns that excessive standardisation can cause companies to fail because agriculture varies significantly by geography, regulation and production system. Yet allowing every market to develop entirely different solutions creates its own problems by undermining focus and operational efficiency.
The most successful companies, he argues, find a middle ground.
“They kept a common technology platform, purpose and organisational values, while allowing considerable flexibility in how the technology was introduced, explained and sometimes even configured,” he said.
“They were globally coherent but locally integrated.”
Lessons beyond agriculture
While the study focuses on agech, Fernández-Vidal believes the findings have broader relevance.
Healthcare, water, energy and climate technologies all face similar challenges when deploying solutions across diverse operating environments, he noted.
“I believe the future of scaling in these sectors may depend on building organisations that can learn continuously while keeping a clear strategic direction.”
For an agtech sector often obsessed with rapid growth and repeatable models, the paper offers a different conclusion: the route to scale may lie not in eliminating friction but in learning from it.
