From the laboratory to the consumer: Innovation, supply chain, and adoption with applications to natural resources.

We analyze the transition from innovative ideas to final marketed products. This transition occurs through two synergetic supply chains for innovation and products. Basic concepts are developed, tested, upscaled, and introduced to commercial use in the innovation supply chain. Then, the products are produced and delivered to the consumer through the product supply chain. We argue that product markets trace their birth to product innovations. These markets tend to start as noncompetitive, which rewards innovators. Credit access and risk determine the reliance on contracting and product diffusion over space and time. The innovation and product supply chains are encouraged and facilitated by public policies, such as support for research and education, intellectual property rights protection, low barriers to trade, science-based regulation, and well-functioning capital markets. We argue for multidisciplinary research incorporating knowledge from economics, business, and engineering to better understand the evolution of innovative companies and supply chains. This understanding will help the development of policies to address challenges of climate change and food security among others.

"Pivoting" by food industry firms to cope with COVID-19 in developing regions: E-commerce and "copivoting" delivery intermediaries.

Coronavirus disease 2019 and related lockdown policies in 2020 shocked food industry firms' supply chains in developing regions. Firms "pivoted" to e-commerce to reach consumers and e-procurement to reach processors and farmers. "Delivery intermediaries" copivoted with food firms to help them deliver and procure. This was crucial to the ability of the food firms to pivot. The pandemic was a "crucible" that induced this set of fast-tracking innovations, accelerating the diffusion of e-commerce and delivery intermediaries, and enabling food industry firms to redesign, at least temporarily, and perhaps for the long term, their supply chains to be more resilient, and to weather the pandemic, supply consumers, and contribute to food security. We present a theoretical model to explain these firm strategies, and then apply the framework to classify firms' practical strategies. We focus on cases in Asia and Latin America. Enabling policy and infrastructural conditions allowed firms to pivot and copivot fluidly.

Potential psychological accounts for the relation between food insecurity and body overweight.

We suggest two psychological mechanisms, temporal discounting and feeling of resource scarcity, for explaining the relation between food insecurity and body overweight. We demonstrate how Nettle et al.'s findings could be explained, post hoc, by each of these accounts, suggesting that their data are not rich enough to allow identification of mechanisms that underlie food insecurity and overweight relationship.