Growing empirical evidence suggests that innovation platforms can be effective in enhancing agricultural research impact by creating an enabling environment for scaling of innovations such as novel technologies, practices and busines models . However, efforts to understand how these innovation platforms operate to scale innovations are insufficient. Such knowledge is critical for improving the design of agricultural innovation systems, specifically within the context of a rising interest in the innovation platform approach to support the transformation of agriculture across Africa.

How do systemic intermediaries obtain legitimate roles for themselves in innovation systems and transition processes? This is still an understudied question in the study of systemic intermediaries. This study started from the observation that roles, or positions, are not given, but emerge in interactions as a negotiated set of rights and obligations.

Research for development (R4D) projects increasingly engage in multi-stakeholder innovation platforms (IPs) asan innovation methodology, but there is limited knowledge of how the IP methodology spreads from one contextto another. That is, how experimentation with an IP approach in one context leads to it being succesfully re-plicated in other contexts.

Ecological intensification has been proposed as a promising lever for a transition towards more sustainable food systems. Various food systems exist that are based on ecological intensification and may have potential for a sustainability transition. Little is known, however, about their diversity and about how they perform against dominant systems in terms of the multiple societal goals. The aim of this study is to contribute to knowledge about sustainability transitions in food systems through an empirical analysis of vegetable food systems in Chile.

Agriculture 4.0 is comprised of different already operational or developing technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, synthetic protein, cellular agriculture, gene editing technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and machine learning, which may have pervasive effects on future agriculture and food systems and major transformative potential. These technologies underpin concepts such as vertical farming and food systems, digital agriculture, bioeconomy, circular agriculture, and aquaponics.