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).

Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.

The concept of an innovation platform is increasingly used in interventions inspired by agricultural innovation systems thinking, as a way of bringing stakeholders from a sector together to enable transformative change. An essential role on such innovation platforms is thought to be that of the ‘innovation champion’, but this role has so far not been unravelled.

Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.

This paper discusses external influences on innovation platforms (IPs) and the options for effective responses. The platforms examined in this paper were conceived as vehicles for facilitating institutional change in support of innovation that benefits smallholders, in selected agro-enterprise domains in Benin, Ghana and Mali. They were designed and implemented in a manner that enabled experimentation with processes of change in the selected domains.

If agro-ecological systems are to realize their potential as sustainable alter- natives to conventional agricultural systems, innovation diffusion needs to be enhanced. We conducted surveys among 214 small-scale vegetable farmers in Benin, a food-deficit country in West Africa, on how they perceived the different attributes of eco-friendly nets (EFNs). The nets act as physical barriers against insects in vegetable production and so reduce pesticide use. Understanding farmer perceptions about new technologies helps reveal farmers’ propensity to adopt them.