The inadequate linkage of knowledge generation in agricultural research organizations with policy-making and economic activity is an important barrier to sustainable development and poverty reduction. The emerging fields of sustainability science and innovation systems studies highlight the importance of “boundary management” and “innovation brokering” in linking knowledge production, policy-making, and economic activities. This paper analyzes how the Papa Andina Partnership Program, based at the International Potato Center, functions as an innovation broker in the Andean potato sector.

Although much has been written on how to implement and facilitate innovation platforms efficiently, few studies support ex-ante appraisal of when and for what purpose innovation platforms provide an appropriate mechanism for achieving development outcomes, and what kinds of human and financial resource investments and enabling environments are required. Without these insights, innovation platforms run the risk of being promoted as a panacea for all problems in the agricultural sector.

The development community has shown increasing interest in the potential of innovation systems and value chain development approaches for reducing poverty and stimulating greater gender equity in rural areas. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of systematic knowledge on how such approaches have been implemented in different contexts, the main challenges in their application, and how they can be scaled to enable large numbers of poor people to benefit from participation in value chains.

This chapter examines processes to inform decision making and manage innovation at four generally defined levels of the innovation system for agriculture; policy, investment, organization, and intervention and also identifies methods relevant at each level for assessing, prioritizing, monitoring, and evaluating innovation processes so that practitioners have the information needed for decision making and for managing limited resources effectively.

Understanding how an innovation system emerges and develops is critical to its promotion and to ensuring successful innovation processes. Unfortunately, research on innovation system approaches has neglected the interplay between innovation and entrepreneurship and overlooked focus on how innovation systems occur. Based on a unique framework integrating the innovation systems concept and entrepreneurship theory, this study uncovers a process of innovation system formation: a self-organizing system of innovation based on a promising technology: the New Rice for Africa (NERICA).

This paper sets out an analytical framework for doing research on the question of how to use agricultural research for innovation and impact. Its focus is the Research Into Use programme sponsored by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). This is one example of a new type of international development programme that seeks to find better ways of using research for developmental purposes.