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) Tools and (iv) Organisational Format.
Growing local and informal markets in Asia and Africa provide both challenges and opportunities for small holders. In developing countries, market failures often lead to suboptimal performance of the value chains and limited and inequitable participation of the poor. In recent years, innovation platforms have been promoted as mechanisms to stimulate and support multistakeholder collaboration in the context of research for development. They are recognized as having the potential to link value chain actors, and enhance communication and collaboration to overcome market failures.
On 15 November 2012, as part of the IFAD East and Southern Africa regional meeting in Addis Ababa, ILRI was asked to convene and facilitate a 1 hour session on ways that CGIAR and IFAD could collaborate. The session drew on contributions from different CGIAR centres; it involved speakers from ILRI, IWMI and ICARDA. It provided a very good, but short, opportunity to make connections between some CGIAR staff and IFAD and project staff; several individual follow up conversations were triggered.
World Bank Institute (WBI) works to improve the understanding, practice and results of capacity development, an important way to support development goals and priorities for aid effectiveness. WBI developed the Capacity Development and Results Framework (CDRF), as a strategic and country-led approach to capacity development that emphasizes the empowerment of local agents through learning, knowledge and innovation.
This paper traces the evolution of the innovation systems framework within the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa, and presents a conceptual framework for agricultural innovation systems. The difference between innovation ecology/ecosystems and intervention-based innovations systems is highlighted, given that these two concepts are used at different levels in promoting and sustaining agricultural innovations.
This report is concerned with the ‘who?’ ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ of pro-poor extension. It builds on the analytical framework proposed in the Inception Report of the same study (Christoplos, Farrington and Kidd, 2001), taking it forward by fleshing out the analysis with empirical information gathered from several countries during the course of the study (from primary data in Bolivia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uganda and Vietnam, and from secondary sources in a range of other countries, including India), and drawing conclusions on the scope for action by governments and donors in a range of contexts.
The purpose of the paper, using a comprehensive innovation systems failure framework, is to assess the performance of agrifood innovation systems of Scotland and the Netherlands, through analysis of the key innovation actors (organisations, networks or influential individuals), and their key functions (research provider, intermediary etc), and those mechanisms that either facilitate or hinder the operation of the IS (known as inducing and blocking mechanisms, respectively).
The emergence of a globalised knowledge economy, and the contemporary views of innovation capacity that this trend enables and informs, provides a new context in which development assistance to agricultural research and development needs to be considered. The main argument in this paper, which focuses on The Netherlands, is that development assistance should use this emerging scenario to identify niches where inputs can add value to the R&D investments of others, particularly in activities that help wire up innovation systems, linking R&D to other activities and actors in society.
Recent interest in inclusive innovation to serve base-of-the-pyramid markets has so far produced relatively little evidence about the role of policy. Drawing on cases from Kenya's mobile phone sector that have successfully scaled innovations to poor consumers, we suggest that policy-making is not only present, but can also have a significant role in shaping and supporting inclusive innovation systems. In these cases, inclusive innovation has been built upon a reinforcing circle of adaptive innovation, dynamic competition, and presence of innovation intermediaries within poor communities.
This publication represents a synthesis of assessments of national agricultural innovation systems in countries of Central Asia, South Caucasus and Turkey. The first chapter gives an introduction of the project “Capacity Development for Analysis and Strengthening of Agricultural Innovation Systems in Central Asia and Turkey”, out of which the current publication reports about one of the project outputs achieved.