This paper is a contribution to the establishment of a new capacity development (CD) 9 strategy, a process that the Consortium Office will facilitate, with external input, during 2013. The paper explores the lessons learned from CGIAR’s experience with CD and reflects the findings of a working group that was brought together in late 2012. The objective of the paper is to identify the roles that individual and institutional CD might play in CGIAR in order to increase CGIAR’s impact on the welfare of smallholder farmers and the sustainability of their farming systems.

Public-private partnerships are a new way of carrying out research and development (R&D) in Latin America's agricultural sector. These partnerships spur innovation for agricultural development and have various advantages over other institutional arrangements fostering R&D. This report summarizes the experiences of a research project that analyzed 125 public-private research partnerships (PPPs) in 12 Latin American countries. The analysis indicates that several types of partnerships have emerged in response to the various needs of the different partners.

Traditional approaches to innovation systems policymaking and governance often focus exclusively on the central provision of services, regulations, fiscal measures, and subsidies.

In this paper, results from a study on the use of improved coffee production technology schemes among smallholder coffee producers in three prominent coffee producing regions in Honduras are presented. The impact of various schemes (trajectories) in which different agents influence the producers’ decision to use new technologies was analyzed. In particular, there are differences in the influence of a) private coffee buying organizations and b) government and public development agencies on the innovation behavior of coffee growers.

This study examines the role of public–private partnerships in international agricultural research. It is intended to provide policymakers, researchers, and business decisionmakers with an understanding of how such partnerships operate, how they promote the exchange of knowledge and technology, and how they contribute to poverty reduction.

Public–private partnerships that aim at the development of innovations have gained increasing attention from governments, public research and private companies, because they enable partners to draw from complementary resources and profit from synergy and joint learning. This article develops arguments for when partnerships should form and compares them with experiences in real partnership cases in Latin America.

One of the most important things that innovation platforms do is to build the capacity of their members to innovate. Some key elements of innovation capacity include: self-organization, learning new skills, changing mindsets, valuing others’ roles in innovation, having a holistic view, being able to adapt to changing situations, creating new ideas, recognizing opportunities, being proactive, using indigenous ideas, and looking to the future. This brief uses the analogy of a traditional African cooking pot to explain how innovation capacity is developed within an innovation platform.

This is the first chapter of the book "Innovation platforms for agricultural development: Evaluating the mature innovation platforms landscape". It introduces the background, case study competition process, case study characterization and readers’ guide, and book outline. Characterization of the case studies includes their geographical spread, age and life stage of the platforms, and specific information on the multi-stakeholder processes, the content matter, platform support functions, and outcomes and impacts.

This is a chapter of the book Innovation platforms for agricultural development edited by Iddo Dror, Jean-Joseph Cadilhon, Marc Schut, Michael Misiko and Shreya Maheshwari.

The CGIAR Research Program on Integrated System for the Humid Tropics, or Humidtropics, works towards transforming the lives of the rural poor in several action sites in Asia, Africa and Tropical America. In doing so, different technologies and innovations were implemented and while at first the capacity development was going on almost intuitively, as an integrated part of the implementation process, it has soon become clear that such groundbreaking activities and ideas require a more organized and supervised approach.