The balance of debates about innovation systems ideas in agricultural and rural developmentseems to have shifted from conceptualisation and historical analysis to planning and practice. National and international development agencies are now grappling with the need to rethinktheir investments in line with this new perspective. In this edition the authors suggest 10 priority topics where rethinking isneeded and where there seems to be enough experience to provide advice
Understanding how an innovation system emerges and develops is critical to its promotion and to ensuring successful innovation processes. Unfortunately, research on innovation system approaches has neglected the interplay between innovation and entrepreneurship and overlooked focus on how innovation systems occur. Based on a unique framework integrating the innovation systems concept and entrepreneurship theory, this study uncovers a process of innovation system formation: a self-organizing system of innovation based on a promising technology: the New Rice for Africa (NERICA).
This paper sets out an analytical framework for doing research on the question of how to use agricultural research for innovation and impact. Its focus is the Research Into Use programme sponsored by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). This is one example of a new type of international development programme that seeks to find better ways of using research for developmental purposes.
This paper aims to map the experience of the RIU Asia projects and draw out the main innovation management tactics being observed while laying the groundwork for further research on this topic. It provides a framework to help analyse the sorts of innovation management tasks that are becoming important. This framework distinguishes four elements of innovation management: (i) Functions (ii) Actions (iii) Toolsand (iv) Organisational Format.
The study explored the nature of innovation response capacity and the building of policy-relevant innovation capacity in the context of livestock-related emergencies in East Africa.
This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on agricultural innovation were “not put into use” in the programme’s implementation. However, the experience provides three important lessons for donors and governments to make use of agricultural research: (i) Promoting research into use requires enabling innovation.
Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
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.
Successful cases of innovation invariably demonstrate a range of partnerships, alliances and network-like arrangements that connect together knowledge users, knowledge producers and others involved in enabling innovation in the market, policy and civil society arenas. With this comes the realisation that public agricultural research needs to strengthen links to a wider set of players from the private and civil society sectors and, of course, farmers themselves. Public agricultural extension services have traditionally played the role of linking farmers to technology.
Agricultural innovation invariably involves a whole range of partnerships, alliances and network-like arrangements that connect together knowledge users, knowledge producers and others involved in enabling innovation in the market, policy and civil society arenas. There is now a very large conceptual and empirical literature that reveals agricultural innovation not as process of invention driven by research, but as a process of making novel use of ideas (old and new) with the specific intention of adding social, economic and/or environmental value.