Anchoring innovation methodologies to ‘go-to-scale’; a framework to guide agricultural research for development

Research for development (R4D) projects increasingly engage in multi-stakeholder innovation platforms (IPs) asan innovation methodology, but there is limited knowledge of how the IP methodology spreads from one contextto another. That is, how experimentation with an IP approach in one context leads to it being succesfully re-plicated in other contexts. To inspire development actors to consider the fit of an innovation methodology for acontext, following work on anchoring for scaling, was developed a framework for networking-, methodological,and institutional anchoring and applied it to a R4D IP in order to test the value of such an anchoring approach forunderstanding the scaling of innovation methodologies such as IP. The authors selected a R4D project with a FarmerResearch Group-Innovation Platform in Ethiopia, whose technical output and methodological approach weregreatly appreciated by the actors involved. Using the anchoring framework, the executed or non-executed taskswere identified. Besides, the embedding of the methodological experiment the potential up-scaling and out-scaling were systematically analyzed. The analysis yielded the strengths and weaknesses of the anchoring workdone so far to scale the innovation methodology used, and provided concrete suggestions of how to proceed if aninnovation project considers ‘going to scale’