Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
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) Toolsand (iv) Organisational Format.
This chapter documents the learning process within the framework of innovation of soil fertility management practices that emerged from the implementation of Participatory Extension Approach (PEA) as part of service delivery reorientation within the Limpopo Department of Agriculture in South Africa.The chapter gives a narrative description of what transpired during the interaction between researchers, extension officers and farmers, the processes involved, the lessons and the conclusion.
The guide on Reflexive Monitoring in Action offers principles, practical guidelines as well as theory and tools. Additional tools, developed more recently, are provided separately. The guide and tools focus on three target groups: Reflexive monitors Consultants, innovation brokers and action researchers who are (or will be) handling the actual monitoring Innovation managers Project managers or innovation champions who feel responsible for the progress of the innovation process and the realisation of the system innovation ambition.
This manual describes a number of tools that can be used in courses to facilitate the process of reflecting on the knowledge and experiences participants acquire, with the aim of making their leaning more explicit and articulated and contribute to their professional performance in their own working context.
We are facing complex societal problems such as climate change, human conflict, poverty and inequality, and need innovative solutions. Multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) are more and more seen as a critical way of coming to such innovative solutions. It is thought that when multiple stakeholders are able to meet, share experiences, learn together and contribute to decisions, new and innovative ways of dealing with problems are found and turned into action. Still, much remains to be understood about the role and effectiveness of social learning in multi-stakeholder settings.
This paper introduces a new research framework for social learning, to be able to derive ways to facilitate social learning. The authors report on an explorative interview study to substantiate the framework. One interesting conclusion was that hidden agenda’s were shown to undermine trust, which in turn undermined the social learning process. This explains the importance of openness for social learning. Research results show substantiate the research framework, and show that it can be used to derive methods to facilitate social learning.
The capacity of existing monitoring and decision making tools in generating evidence about the performance of R4D with multi-stakeholder processes, such as innovation platforms (IPs), public private partnerships (PPP), participatory value chain management (PVCM) is very limited. Results of these tools are either contextual and qualitative such as case studies that can not be used by other R4D interventions or quantitative i.e. impact assessments that do not inform what works in R4D.
The transition to a market for agricultural research and knowledge-intensive services presents various challenges for actors in the agricultural knowledge infrastructure, on both the demand side (end users of innovations such as farmers, and the government) and the supply side (providers of research and knowledge-intensive services). New organizational arrangements try to bring together supply and demand in the agricultural knowledge infrastructure. This thesis is about such new organizational arrangements
This toolbox has been developed to collate different tools and methods that can be used for food system analysis.
It is specifically based on systems thinking for food system analysis, with the aim to formulate actionable recommendations that can bring about systemic change.It describes both the process of a food system analysis, as well as a set of tools that can be used at different stages.