Enhancing Agricultural Innovation: How to Go Beyond the Strengthening of Research Systems

This Economic and Sector Work paper, “Enhancing Agricultural Innovation: How to Go Beyond the Strengthening of Research Systems,” was initiated as a result of the international workshop, “Development of Research Systems to Support the Changing Agricultural Sector,” organized by the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank in June 2004 in Washington, DC. One of the main conclusions of the workshop was that “strengthened research systems may increase the supply of new knowledge and new technologies, but such strengthening may not necessarily correlate very well with the capacity to innovate and adopt innovations throughout the agricultural sector, and thereby with economic growth.” This paper uses an innovation systems perspective to explore which other interventions may be required.