Linking Agricultural Research to Innovation: An Introduction To RIU'S Research Design

RIU is a research and development programme designed to put agricultural research into use for developmental purposes and to conduct research on how to do this. The programme is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). It follows earlier investments by DFID in agricultural and natural resources research, supported through its renewable natural resources research strategy (RRNRRS). While this strategy delivered high-quality research, the uptake of this research and its impact on social and economic progress was modest. RIU seeks to address this both by supporting activities that put RNRRS research products into use, but also by investigating the wider question of the relationship between agricultural research and innovation. This wider investigation of the topic responds to extensive evidence that suggests that agricultural innovation is very often not the result of simply transferring research products to farmers, entrepreneurs and policymakers. More usually, research promotes innovation only when it is embedded in the wide set of relationships and processes involved in diffusing, combining and adapting ideas and putting them into use. Understanding the configurations of actors, policies and institutions that allow agricultural research to contribute to innovation and development in different circumstance is the central research task of RIU. The programme’s research design is largely inductive, seeking to learn from an analysis of RIU’s own experiments in putting research into use. This paper will be coupled with contrasting comparator case studies as well as case studies of other promising research-into-use type approaches not covered by RIU