New Challenges for Agribusiness Management. Designing a Curriculum for Competencies Building

Emerging market and industry trends are reshaping substantially the critical variables which impact on the competitiveness of agrifood companies. Food producers, processors and distributors face new challenges related with the management of the whole supply chain. The increasing industry dynamism and complexity requires improved engineering and management capabilities for agribusiness leaders, related with the analysis of macroeconomic, consumption and distribution patterns as well as with the design and implementation of new models for managing operations and technology. In this paper, we present a framework for competencies building for agribusiness managers. A multidisciplinary approach is illustrated for the design of a curriculum targeted for executive education programmes. Starting from a definition for the agribusiness manager profile, and based on the review of both theory contributions and domain-specific education initiatives, we define a topicsbased taxonomy of technical contents together with a set of learning objectives to be achieved for the profile.