There are many ways to help bring good ideas to life. Nesta works to uncover, develop and test, new ways of supporting innovation from across sectors and around the world. These techniques, tools and processes are collectively known as innovation methods.

Featured in this compendium are just some of the innovation methods we have explored over the last decade. Some, like seed accelerator programmes, we have invested in and studied. Others, like challenge prizes, standards of evidence or public sector labs, we have developed and helped to spread around the world.

This situation analysis report provides a snapshot of the regional and subregional policies and frameworks that support biofortification and the organizations implementing various nutrition- sensitive initiatives. The report identifies some ongoing initiatives that are relevant to the The Building Nutritious Food Baskets (BNFB) Project mandate and that can be aligned to its activities to facilitate its starting up and scaling up. The report recommends the key actions necessary to facilitate increased investment in and scaling up of biofortified crops in sub-Saharan Africa.

WhatsApp sends real-time messages and is one of the world’s most popular communication applications in the 21st century. The present study highlights and examines the domestication of WhatsApp among farmers. An exhaustive whatsapp user list was prepared from each village and 3 farmers were selected with the help of systematic sampling technique. Thus, 90 farmers from the 3 blocks of the district using whatsapp were purposively selected and grouped for sending the messages of agricultural aspects. The study was conducted at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Neemuch during 2016-17.

This ‘Tourist Guide’ is a resource document charting the emerging landscape of systems studies on rural innovation. Note that the term ‘rural innovation’ is used rather than ‘agricultural innovation’ in recognition of the wider scope of knowledge applications that are important in contemporary rural livelihoods. There is a growing body of literature dealing with rural innovation with some research groups developing ideas over the last 20 odd years on the topic.

Mobile phones fit well into the lives of pastoralists in low-income countries. The technology is firmly integrated into most pastoralist communities, affecting and transforming several core activities. Most studies concerned with this relationship, however, have narrow regional and thematic foci. The complementarity or discrepancy between relevant research is unknown, and a critical assessment of the current state of research is lacking.

In this article it is analysed the results of applying a co-innovation approach to five research projects in the New Zealand primary sector. The projects varied in depth and breadth of stakeholder engagement, availability of ready-made solutions, and prevalence of interests and conflicts. The projects show how and why co-innovation approaches in some cases contributed to a shared understanding of complex problems. Our results confirm the context-specificity of co-innovation practices

Precision agriculture (PA) is growing considerably in Brazil. However, there is a lack of information regarding to PA adoption and use in the country. This study sought to: (i) investigate the perception of growers and service dealership about PA technologies; (ii) identify constraints to PA adoption; (iii) obtain information that might be useful to motivate producers and agronomists to use PA technologies in the crop production systems.

There is sufficient evidence, drawn from surveys of innovation in the public sector and cognitive testing interviews with public sector managers, to develop a framework for measuring public sector innovation. Although many questions that are covered in the Oslo Manual guidelines for measuring innovation in the private sector can be applied with some modifications to the public sector, public sector innovation surveys need to meet policy needs that require collecting additional types of data.

In theory, under the federal structure agricultural extension services can serve communities better as it aims to be client responsive and accountable to its consumers at the village level. However, poor understanding of federalism that has only recently emerged from the persisting centralized and feudal conceptions, limited practices of democratic norms and values primarily due to the lack of understanding of local governance, and limited commitment of political actors and policy makers to federalism, may derail the good intentions behind federalism.