Abstract
Recently, the EU policy measures have been widely applied to encourage early retirement from farming. Current age structure of society requires opposite approach. Key challenges for rural development policy aiming to increase quality of life of elder people are dealing not only with traditional help and support measures, but with involvement of elder generation into economic and social life also. The new EU agricultural policy measures should ensure that funding and institutional incentives support extending working and active social life of elder farmers. One of possible ways to change approach deals with servitization. However, despite implementation of service-driven business model in agriculture opened new possibilities to use knowledge and experience of old generation, the servitization movement is still weak in agriculture. Restricted adoption of service-driven business models in agriculture largely depends on the lack of research on this topic and guidelines for practitioners. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate an ability of servitization projects to influence the vitality of rural communities by generating economic, social and cultural effects. Case study on innovative servitization initiative “Rent a piece of garden” in rural areas of Lithuania is provided as illustration of innovative business model in agriculture and multifaceted impact of servitization on vitality of ageing rural community.
JEL codes: Q01,R11, O31, O35, D85
Vidickiene, D.; Gedminaite-Raudone, Z. 2019. Servitization as a Tool to Increase Vitality of Ageing Rural Community. European Countryside, Vol. 11, Issue 1, p. 85–97; online ISSN:1803-8417; 10.2478/euco-2019-0006; [AGRICOLA (National Agricultural Library); AGRIS; Baidu Scholar; CABI (over 50 subsections); CNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure); CNPIEC - cnpLINKer; Dimensions; DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals); EBSCO (relevant databases); EBSCO Discovery Service; EconBiz; Engineering Village; ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences); Genamics JournalSeek; GeoArchive; Geobase; Google Scholar; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (ProQuest); Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST); J-Gate; JournalTOCs; KESLI-NDSL (Korean National Discovery for Science Leaders); Microsoft Academic; Naviga (Softweco); Primo Central (ExLibris); ProQuest (relevant databases); Publons; QOAM (Quality Open Access Market); ReadCube; Reaxys; Research Papers in Economics (RePEc); SCImago (SJR); SCOPUS; Summon (ProQuest); TDNet; Ulrich's Periodicals Directory/ulrichsweb; WanFang Data; Web of Science - Emerging Sources Citation Index; WorldCat (OCLC)].