Designing and organizing support for collective innovation in agriculture

This chapter reports on the different functions fulfilled by existing mechanisms for supporting collective innovation in the agricultural and agrifood sectors in the countries of the Global South in order to identify the potential contributions the research community can make to strengthen them. The authors show that a variety of mechanisms are needed to create enabling conditions for innovation and to provide a step-by-step support to innovation communities, according to their capacities and learning needs. Researchers are encouraged to move beyond their traditional roles of knowledge producers or trainers and work more closely with actors involved in supporting innovation. They can then generate new knowledge about innovation mechanisms themselves, helping to design and organize the support for collective innovation in a variety of situations