This book is about the challenges and practical realities of building the capacity to innovate. It describes the experiences of the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, a five-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. Specifically, it explores different approaches through which innovation capacities were built. One approach was to establish and support innovation platforms (IPs) – an approach increasingly advocated as a way to broker linkages and facilitate interaction between multiple stakeholders in order to enable agricultural innovation. Originally, IPs were intended to help put existing research findings into use for developmental purposes in Africa. The purpose of this book is to describe lessons from these experiences for practitioners and policy-makers in the national and international arenas who are planning and implementing investments to enable agricultural innovation.
This research explores the role of innovation platforms and how they relate to IAR4D and the innovation system perspective, with treatment both at the theoretical and case study level (Africa). The chapters of the book take up several sticky issues...
This review studied a selection of projects from the Research Into Use (RIU) Africa portfolio: the Nyagatare maize platform in Rwanda; the cowpea platform in Kano state, Nigeria; the pork platform in Malawi, the Farm Input Promotions (FIPS) Best Bet in Kenya,...
Analysis of the role of Global Value Chains (GVC) in accessing knowledge and enhancing learning and innovation. Global Value Chains, Innovation Systems, Governance, Foreign Direct Investment, Learning, Upgrading, Productivity. Three main conclusions emerge from the analytical framework and evidence presented...
Ethiopian agriculture is changing as new actors, relationships, and policies influence the ways in which small-scale, resource-poor farmers access and use information and knowledge in their agricultural production decisions. Although these changes suggest new opportunities for smallholders, too little is...
Explicitly integrating reflection in the learning process of multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) increases the likelihood that purposeful change will occur. When reflectivity is made part of learning in MSPs, learning will become clearer and better articulated and it will contribute more...