Innovation for Fashion or Action?

Sustainable agricultural development requires innovation. Due to globalisation and liberalisation, amongst other factors, smallholder producers operate in an increasingly complex and hence uncertain environment. This provides new challenges and opportunities, and requires continuous adaptation and more systemic approaches to agricultural innovation. There has been a growing interest in building innovation capacity through Innovation Platforms (IP) in recent years. This reflects a trend in agricultural development practice to focus interventions on the support of innovation processes rather than just on the supply of new technologies. This new focus draws attention to the different sorts of changes that are involved, capacities required and the wide range of actors involved in innovation. These ideas are elegantly articulated in the concept of an innovation system, with its emphasis on the importance of links between different actors and the role of the policy and institutional environment as an enabler of interaction, information flows and learning and change. 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 in Africa, a five-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. The book documents lessons for practitioners and policy-makers in the national and international arenas who are planning and implementing investments to enable agricultural innovation.