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LINKING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH TO INNOVATION:
AN INTRODUCTION TO RIU’S RESEARCH DESIGN
Andy Hall, Jeroen Dijkman and Rasheed Sulaiman
1. Introduction
RIU is a research and development programme designed to put agricultural research into use
for developmental purposes and to conduct research on how to do this. The programme is
funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). It follows earlier
investments by DFID in agricultural and natural resources research, supported through its
renewable natural resources research strategy (RRNRRS). While this strategy delivered high-
quality research, the uptake of this research and its impact on social and economic progress
was modest.
RIU seeks to address this both by supporting activities that put RNRRS research products
into use, but also by investigating the wider question of the relationship between agricultural
research and innovation. This wider investigation of the topic responds to extensive evidence
that suggests that agricultural innovation is very often not the result of simply transferring
research products to farmers, entrepreneurs and policymakers. More usually, research
promotes innovation only when it is embedded in the wide set of relationships and processes
involved in diffusing, combining and adapting ideas and putting them into use.
Understanding the configurations of actors, policies and institutions that allow agricultural
research to contribute to innovation and development in different circumstance is the central
research task of RIU. The programme’s research design is largely inductive, seeking to learn
from an analysis of RIU’s own experiments in putting research into use. This will be coupled
with contrasting comparator case studies as well as case studies of other promising research-
into-use type approaches not covered by RIU.
2. Exploring the Link between Research and Innovation
The critique of agricultural research failing to lead to innovation and impact is not a new one.
There is now a broad consensus that recognises that it is not the research products or
technologies, per se, that are ineffective, but rather the process by which these products are
developed. This builds on four observations about the nature of the innovation process.
a) Successful innovation involves a high degree of user input. This means that
innovation involves the blending of tacit and codified knowledge from different
sources including but not limited to research.
b) Knowledge use is an embedded process, highly context-specific and rarely amenable
to simple transfer to different locations without adaptation and reworking.
c) Innovation is a social process of learning, whereby strategies, approaches and
capacities develop over time through experience and other forms of knowledge
accumulation, leading to recognisable path-dependent innovation trajectories.
d) The political economy of knowledge and knowledge-related process skews innovation
trajectories in certain directions and purposeful institutional arrangements are required
to specifically target public and social goals such as poverty reduction or
sustainability.
Where there is less agreement is on the question of the sorts of organisational configurations
(networks, partnerships and alliances) institutional settings (routines, norms and ways of
working) and policy environments that are required to operationalise these observations in
agricultural research and innovation planning. Instead, there are a series of overlapping
innovation narratives competing for policy attention, all implying different roles and
configurations of research within the innovation process. These narratives cover the
spectrum, from farmer-led innovation to research-led innovation, and assign various roles to
public, private and civil society organisations and individuals.
It is increasingly argued that instead of viewing these as competing innovation narratives,
what is actually required and needed is innovation diversity. So, for example, under some
circumstances research-led innovation may be necessary. At other times farmer participatory
research may be required. Public-private sector partnerships could promote certain types of
innovation process. Sometimes innovation will require dense networks of diverse actors. At
other times only relatively few actors will be critical. Different institutional arrangements will
be required to achieve social and environmental goals. Similarly, as an innovation trajectory
unfolds over time research will be embedded in the innovation process in different ways,
reflecting different roles that it plays.
The key research question for RIU is, therefore, not to find the best way of putting research
into use. Instead the key research question concerns understanding which sorts of
configurations are relevant under what circumstances and at which stages in different
innovation trajectories.
3. RIU Research Design
In order to address this broad research question RIU has selected 6 innovation narratives to
organise its research around. These represent commonly-found innovation narratives that are
currently competing for attention in development policy. Each of these narratives has implicit
hypotheses and specific questions. Understanding when and under what circumstance these
narratives have relevance will make a major contribution to development research planning.
a) Poor User-Led Innovation. Poor farmers and consumers should be at the centre of
the innovation process as they have superior knowledge of their production and social
context. The role of research varies, but is usually peripheral or of a backstopping
nature. Key questions include: How to strengthen decentralised innovation capacities
of this sort and what are the institutional and policy regimes needed to promote
products that emerge in this way, particularly seed varieties? How can the governance
of innovation ensure that the voice of the poor is heard in agricultural science and
technology planning and implementation?
b) Public-Private Partnership-Led Innovation. The private sector has not played an
adequate role in public agricultural research and allied activities. It sometimes has
research expertise of its own. It also has incentives, structures and mechanisms to
deliver demanded technologies to consumers (farmers and others in the value chain).
Key research questions include: What types of innovation and innovation process are
helped by involvement of the private sector? When does the private sector’s
involvement help the poor and what sort of incentives and institutional arrangements
are needed to allow this to happen? How can social capital be developed between
companies and other elements of the innovation system?
c) Capacity Development-Led Innovation. The rate limiting step in technical change is
not technology development or promotion, per se, but the level of innovation
capacity. This capacity is viewed in a systems sense as the behaviours of loose
networks of innovation-related players and the institutional and policy settings that
shape their behaviour and evolution. Key research questions: What interventions can
facilitate institutional and policy change? How can innovation capacities be made
more responsive to changing social, economic and environmental conditions? How
can learning-based change be stimulated and accelerated? What is the role of
intermediation and innovation brokering services?
d) Opportunity-Led Innovation. Opportunities presented by large markets of poor
people are leading the emergence of new types of innovation processes and products.
Also emerging are innovation process that are invisible to research and corporate
communities due to alternative professional views of excellence and success. These
are described alternatively as Bottom-of-the-Pyramid Innovation and Below-the-
Radar Innovation. Innovation along value chains is a key feature of these
developments. Key research question include: What are the new modes of innovation
that are emerging? Do these genuinely present opportunities for developmentally-
relevant innovation? How can largely invisible processes be identified and supported?
Do innovations along value chains allow poor producers and consumers to benefit
from new market opportunities?
e) Investment-Led Innovation. Financial resources are a key incentive for innovation
and are increasingly used to help encourage the development of new partnership
configurations around specific problem areas and research products. Innovation prize
funds, public buy-back for private development products, challenge funds and venture
capital type arrangements are examples of this. Key research questions include: How
effective are such mechanisms in enabling innovation processes that are
developmentally relevant? How useful are these mechanisms in building new
capacities for innovation?
f) Research Communication-Led Innovation. Research products need to be processed
into forms suited to different audiences and made accessible through databases. This
is particularly important for policy-orientated research, where concise and timely
information can play a critical role in decision-making. Key research questions
include: What are the circumstances under which information limits decision-making?
What are the most appropriate communication tools to fill this gap? What patterns of
networking between researchers, decision-makers and others complement
communication?
To explore these different innovation narratives RIU will investigate its own experiments in
putting research into use. The RIU portfolio of activities contains the following elements.
• Best Bets. Up to ten large-scale technology promotion activities that are anticipated
to have significant private sector involvement. Currently two have been selected: (1)
A cluster of activities building on Client-Orientated Breed programmes in South Asia
that is developing ways to establish both seed delivery systems and new capacities for
Client-Orientated Breeding. (2) An initiative in East Africa that is building research
and development activities around the eradication of sleeping sickness.
• Innovation Challenge Fund. A portfolio of projects in South Asia aimed at
developing new partnerships to take advantage of clusters of research products from
the RNRRS. There are two thematic groups of these projects. The first is around
innovation in value chains. The second concerns scaling up of natural resource
management research products.
• Africa Country Programme. RIU has established 6 Africa country programmes in
Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia and Nigeria. The rationale of these
programmes is that currently mechanisms to articulate the demand for research and
other information are poorly developed. The country programmes are, therefore,
experimenting with a variety of networking devices to establish links between
research, entrepreneurial, policy and farming communities with a view to
strengthening innovation capacity.
• Innovation Development Fund. RIU will establish a social venture capital fund to
investigate whether this mode of investment can stimulate development-oriented
innovation.
The approach to putting research into use adopted by RIU is an evolving one that will
develop incrementally by learning throughout the programme’s life. Direct comparison of the
added value of the programme’s approach will, however, be conceptually problematic. The
programme, nevertheless, wishes to explore comparator cases where more traditional
approaches to agricultural research and innovation have dominated. This will be achieved by
investigating a limited number of cases through histories of selected research and innovation
trajectories.