Post Harvest Innovations in Innovation: reflections on partnership and learning

In the post-harvest area and in agriculture research in general, both in India and internationally, policy attention is returning to the question of how innovation can be encouraged and promoted and thus how impact on the poor can be achieved. This publication assembles several cases from the post-harvest sector. These provide examples of successful innovation that emerged in quite different ways. Its purpose is to illustrate and analyze the diversity and often highly context-specific nature of the processes that lead to and promote innovation. The presented cases suggest a number of generic principles needed to develop the capacity of innovation systems: the need to pay more attention to revealing and managing the historical and institutional context of partnerships and relationship; the need to build on local contexts and circumstance rather than introducing external blueprints; and the need to strengthen the learning process and to link this to the broader agenda of institutional change, particularly concerning the governance of public science endeavors.