This document is accompanyng the volume Public Agricultural Research in an Era of Transformation: The Challenge of Agri-Food System Innovation (available in TAPipedia here), which provides some of the groundwork in answering the question of how the CGIAR system and other public agricultural research organisations should adapt and respond to an era of transformation framed by the SDGs.
The purpose of this report is to provide some of the groundwork in answering the question of how the CGIAR system and other public agricultural research organisations should adapt and respond to an era of transformation framed by the SDGs. It does this by exploring the way in which this transformation agenda reframes agricultural research and innovation.
The Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture project (ARISA) started in December 2014 with the aim of increasing net farm income for 10,000 smallholder farming households in eastern Indonesia. The project was designed to address a key challenge in agricultural research for development: how to ensure that proven research outputs1 are available and accessible for use in farming communities.
This brief discusses the emergence of Asia as a hotpot of innovation and the implications for Australia's own innovation capacity
This paper reflects on the experiences of the Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture (ARISA) project to caralyse agricultural innovation by bringing RIs and private sector (PS) actors together in partnerships. Facilitating partnerships to caralyse innovation requires capacity building of individuals as well as institutional change. This paper examines the approaches to parnering for innovation, successes, challenges and lessons learned
This note presents an outline of the main strands of the innovation systems research associated with the ARISA project. It begins by locating this in the current discourse on concepts and policy perspectives on innovation and capacity building before setting out key areas of research inquiry and research activities
Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture (ARISA) was implemented by CSIRO in collaboration with Indonesian partners. This multi-year program seeks to strengthen collaboration between public research organisations and agribusinesses in order to incubate and deliver technology and business solutions appropriate to smallholder farmers. The geographic focus of the program was Eastern Indonesia.
The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a process that takes a multitude of different forms, and, within this process, agricultural research and expertise are mobilised at different points in time for different purposes. This paper uses two key analytical principles in order to find how research is actually put into use.
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.
The universal application of the T&V model of agricultural extension in more than 50 countries is one of agricultural development’s best known failures. The approach worked well in places where it was originally developed, but proved inappropriate almost everywhere else. In this report Rasheed Sulaiman V. and Andy Hall worry that an apparently successful extension innovation piloted in India is set to suffer a similar fate.