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Toillier Aurélie, Faure Guy, Chia Eduardo. 2018. Designing and organizing support for collective innovation in
agriculture. In : Innovation and development in agricultural and food systems. Faure Guy (ed.),
Chiffoleau Yuna (ed.), Goulet Frédéric (ed.), Temple Ludovic (ed.), Touzard Jean-Marc (ed.). Versailles :
Ed. Quae, 108-121
https://www.quae.com/produit/1540/9782759229604/innovation-and-development-in-agricultural-and-food-
systems
Part 3
Providing support to the actors of innovation
Chapter 8
Designing and organizing support for collective
innovation in agriculture
AURÉLIE TOILLIER, GUY FAURE AND EDUARDO CHIA
Summary. 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.
In the context of developing countries where radical changes are needed in order to achieve
sustainable development goals, supporting and accelerating collective innovation in the
agricultural and agrifood sectors has become a central issue. However, even though
innovation in agriculture has never been studied and understood as much as it is presently,
there are still difficulties at the institutional and political levels to mobilize significant public
or private investments to support innovation (Hall, 2007). Existing initiatives remain
disparate, uncoordinated and low-key, and they have limited effects (TAP, 2016). Our
research aims to characterize these initiatives and the support functions they fulfil in order
to identify the possible contributions the research community can make to strengthen them.
Innovation is in essence a risky activity, requiring the actors to engage in a process without
knowing whether it will go to its term, and where the term will exactly be. The actors come
upon problems and solutions along the way, according to a pattern described by Schön
(1983) as a ‘conversation with the situation’ that responds to them, surprises them and
forces them to learn new things. Supporting innovation is therefore a complex undertaking,
as each situation is unique and the outcome uncertain. Rigid protocols have only limited
application and may even be counterproductive. And yet, several such mechanisms exist
today, such as innovation platforms presented as turnkey approaches.
We first present the evolution of the frameworks of thought concerning innovation support
in agriculture, and the types of interventions that they have led to. We then offer an
overview of the range of mechanisms for supporting innovation in order to draw lessons on
the nature of research that could help to improve those mechanisms.
Evolution of frameworks of thought on providing support to
innovation
Garel and Mock (2016) show that innovation requires collective action and an organized
environment. Two schools of thought are prominent in the field of providing support to
innovation for agricultural or rural development. The first believes in facilitation, which aims
to create conditions that are conducive to innovation (Leeuwis and Aarts, 2011). The second
focuses on strategic management, which involves bringing out and supervising a community
of innovating actors, called innovation community, by providing support that is gradually
adapted to each phase, starting from the phases for ideation and design to those for
deployment and dissemination (Raven et al., 2010).
Creating conditions conducive to innovation: the contributions of systemic
thinking
In the 1950s, innovation in agriculture was essentially thought of as a phenomenon of
adoption and adaptation. Science was perceived as external to the socio-economic system,
independent and neutral, and a source of innovation, whereas traditional knowledge was
seen as a barrier to the spread of progress. In this linear model, support for change consisted
of disseminating technological novelties through extension services, which mainly targeted
farmers in order to train them in these new technologies. The best-known approaches
included the technology transfer method, market-driven innovation, and the ‘training and
visit’ system.
While this linear model of technology transfer did contribute to an increase in production
and productivity in some regions of the world, it was nevertheless called into question in the
late 1980s, following a paradigm shift from aid to development, advocating a participation-
by-all approach, which is exemplified in the expression ‘Farmer First’ (Chambers et al., 1989).
Since the beneficiaries, their objectives and their environment had to be taken more into
account, it became necessary to modify the methods of intervention. With more
encompassing approaches being required, the discourse among researchers and
development agencies gave rise to two approaches: AKIS (Agricultural Knowledge and
Information Systems) and AIS (Agricultural Innovation Systems) (Klerkx et al., 2012). In both
these approaches, the interactive innovation model contrasts with the linear model.
Innovation is thought of as a collective process of creation in which collective learning
phenomena play a central role (Argyris and Schön, 1996). The farmer is no longer relegated
to the role of a mere user, one who simply adopts innovation, but becomes a full actor in
innovation in his own right, as a source of knowledge and a co-designer.
The AKIS framework focuses on the exchange of knowledge and information to sustain the
innovation process. It is the actors of research and development, education, and agricultural
advice who are at the heart of mechanisms for providing support to farmers. Participatory
research methods involving farmers then followed, such as participatory research and
development, participatory technology development, the Farmer First approach, or
mechanisms for action-research in partnership (Faure et al., 2014, see also Chapter 9).
The AIS approach is intended to be even more inclusive; it takes into account all the actors
who participate, directly or indirectly, in innovation processes (input suppliers, actors of
supply chains, banks, policymakers, etc.). Participation, the co-creation of knowledge and
value, as well as the facilitation of actor networks are the key principles for designing new
mechanisms to accompany and support innovation. The main form of operationalization of
this approach in the countries of the Global South is the innovation platform (World Bank,
2008). Its goal is to help different categories of actors – who usually have no connection with
each other – interact to share knowledge and to pool resources for innovation. Facilitation is
defined as a voluntary intervention to strengthen the interactions between individuals,
organizations and their social, cultural and political structures through a process of network
building, social learning and negotiation (Leeuwis and Aarts, 2011).
Table 8.1 summarizes contributions systemic thinking has made in structuring support for
innovation, highlighting the differences between the mechanisms that result from it, the
targets of support (from the farmer to a network of multiple organizations), the intended
changes (from technical change to individual or collective capacity building), the principles
and methods used (from training and supervision to the facilitation of learning) and the
professions of support (from the extension worker to the innovation facilitator).
Table 8.1. Contributions of systemic thinking to facilitate innovation in agriculture (adapted
from World Bank, 2008, and from Hall, 2007).
Frameworks of
thought
Agricultural research
system
Agricultural Knowledge
and Information System
(AKIS)
Agricultural Innovation System
(AIS)
Innovation model
Linear: A process that
takes place in the
isolated and controlled
research environment
Interactive: A social process that originates from the complex
interaction of various socio-economic actors
Innovation
mechanism
Technology transfer
Co-production of
knowledge
Complex, systemic, at different
levels and multi-dimensional
(technical, organizational,
methodological)
Vision of interactions
between the actors
concerned
Sequential
interventions, from the
researcher to the
farmer
Involving actors who
possess knowledge
Involving actors who possess
the knowledge and who have
power
Domains of research
used for the design
of support systems
Behavioural studies
(on adoption)
Knowledge management
Network analysis
Agricultural advisory
systems
Farming system
Agency (1) of individuals and
organizations
Institutional entrepreneurship
Adaptive management of
complex systems
Popularized
methods(2) for
supporting
innovation
Technology transfer
Induced innovation
‘Training and visit’
system
Participatory research with
farmers
Participatory technology
development, Farmer First
Action research in
partnership, participatory
rural evaluation
Field school, management
advice for family farms
Innovation platforms
Multi-actor networks
Alliance for learning
Agricultural advice forums
Principles of support
Helping a large
number of farmers
adopt new techniques
Helping farmers participate
in research, training and
advisory mechanisms, and
express their needs, and
adapting inventions
designed without their
involvement
Facilitating interactions,
knowledge exchange,
coordination
Objects of the
support
Product of the
innovation
Users of the innovation
Actors who contribute to the
innovation
Intended changes
Improving farm
performance
Strengthening farmers’
capacities and the
functioning of farms
Strengthening support and
advisory services, and
those disseminating
knowledge in rural areas
Strengthening the capacity to
innovate in all the actors and
creating novelties in
production systems, supply
chains and territories
Professions of
support
Technicians/extension
workers of
government services
Technicians/advisers from
the private and public
sectors
Facilitators of innovation
1. Ability to set goals and act in a consistent manner to achieve them.
2. Popularized methods are those that are labelled, i.e. they are the subject of a book or a methodological guide,
have been used on a large scale in development projects, and involve the use of specific approaches and tools.
The systemic approach to innovation has been widely used by development workers and
researchers (Touzard et al., 2015) and has allowed the widening of the circle of actors to be
considered to accompany innovation (from the farmer to the policymaker), but it is still very
rarely mobilized to design national policies and interventions to support innovation
(Chowdhury et al., 2014). Interventions formulated in development projects or policy
documents often suffer from a lack of operationalization; they are presented as vague
principles of action (such as ‘developing collective capacities to innovate’), leaving
organizations that have to implement them with the responsibility of finding the right
methodology to achieve the intended change (Raven et al., 2010).
Managing innovation strategically: the contributions of theories of learning
and of management
Research on strategic management and learning is increasingly being used to reinforce the
field of analysis of action in order to support the emergence and rise of innovation
communities (TAP, 2016), and thus moderate the overly analytical knowledge generated by
approaches centred on innovation systems.
The aim is to focus on actors in innovation situations and on their support needs, by
recognizing that in the field of agricultural development, the actors are neither experienced
nor trained in the collective designing of innovation, nor are they used to working together
towards a common goal. We define an innovation situation on the basis of the definition by
Girin (2016) of the management situation. It involves, on the one hand, a community of
actors undertaking activities, more or less coordinated, which contribute to developing the
innovation and, on the other, physical, cognitive and relational resources that can be used to
innovate. Each of these actors has a specific interest in the innovation being developed and
their cooperation is guided by common goals. The complexity of an innovation situation can
vary depending on the changes required at the individual and collective scales (changes in
knowledge, attitudes, practices, rules) and the degree of uncertainty encountered.
As advocated by learning theories, developing individuals’ innovation capacities must be the
core of the accompaniment approaches being tried out. The capacity to innovate refers to
the knowledge and skills a group needs to effectively use, master and improve existing
resources, or create new ones, in order to innovate (Hall, 2005). It includes the ability to
apprehend the situation and its environment, set goals, take risks, experiment and
implement concerted actions, build relationships and alliances, and mobilize resources. It is
a matter of both technical and functional capabilities (TAP, 2016).
The managerial perspective helps establish principles of action and create useful tools for
innovation support practitioners. By relying on the theories of adult learning (Kolb et al.,
2001), it becomes possible to determine which tools to use, given the types of learning that
must be generated, whether they are simple or transformative, involving changes in
knowledge, attitudes, practices, rules of action or values. The tools can be diverse and may
consist of, for example, a dashboard, a computer model, a field visit, a participatory
workshop, a monitoring committee, or a charter. They promote learning by guiding
reflection, participating in the creation of a common language, or orienting action. Each tool
must be seen as part of an intervention method that makes sense of the use of the tool.
Research about innovation management draws attention to the complexity of innovation
situations, i.e. to the multiplicity of the critical drivers of innovation at different levels,
individual, organizational and interorganizational (or collective), so that action can be taken
on them (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010). For example, we can compare two innovation
situations: the adaptation of an agricultural technique to a particular agroecological context
vs the creation of a new agricultural model based on agroecological principles (Figure 8.1). In
the first case, individuals or organizations need primarily to incrementally modify their
practices and strategies for action, without questioning the values that guide their actions. It
is a matter of simple learning, which can be supervised or facilitated through
experimentation or decision-making support. In the second case, in contrast, a change in the
reference framework, i.e. a change of all the representations that result from the acquired
experience and that guide future experience, is required. This type of learning, called
‘transformative’ (Mezirow, 1991), requires a different type of support, which focuses on the
capacity to make sense of collective action (i.e.‘sensemaking’ defined by Weick, 2001). Tools
to automate the search for new ways of doing things can be used, such monitoring and
evaluation tools, which foster reflective analysis and enable transformative learning within
the innovation community. A high capacity to innovate will result from the ability to achieve
and combine simple and transformative learning, while continuing to work and by adapting
work routines (Argyris and Schön, 1996). It is such kinds of learning that will enable each
individual to align better with others to achieve collective innovation (Brown et al., 2004).
Figure 8.1 illustrates different innovation support approaches depending on the one hand,
on the complexity of the innovation situation and thus the types of changes required and, on
the other hand, on the capacity of actors to innovate. The support methods and tools to be
used vary according to the four cases
Figure 8.1. Examples of support activities during an innovation process, depending on the
complexity of the innovation situation and the capacity of actors to innovate.
Dubois et al. (2016) show that managing the emergence of innovation communities is crucial
in all innovation situations, especially for creating design spaces, organizing deliberations
and exchanges of ideas, identifying partners to involve, and monitoring collective activities.
Furthermore, the need for support changes as the innovation community and the innovation
itself develop. The main challenge is to get the actors to understand the concepts to be
explored, the knowledge to be acquired, the skills to be built up, and the actions to be
carried out by a judicious combination planning and improvisation (Land et al., 2009). There
are a significant number of failures in the processes of accompaniment since such situations
involving several actors are conducive to opportunistic behaviour and disengagement by
individuals and organizations if their interests are not adequately addressed (Vall et al.,
2016). Strategic management must address these pitfalls, for example by reducing the
duration of certain phases of the innovation process (Cohendet et al., 2008) or by
establishing means for cooperation between the various actors involved (Dhanaraj and
Parkhe, 2006). More specifically, the literature on support for innovation allows us to
distinguish two scales of intervention to reflect on and organize support for innovation: the
local scale of innovation situations and the global scale – sectoral, regional, or national
depending on the context – in which they evolve. Innovation communities have specific
needs for support depending on the stages of the innovation process, the capacities of the
actors involved and the complexity of the innovation situation.
Diversity of support mechanisms: their emergence and
sustainability in the Global South
In this section, we illustrate the diversity of existing support mechanisms that play a role in
accompanying innovation processes and examine their conditions of emergence and
sustainability.
Styles and functions of support
We distinguish mechanisms based on the support functions that they fulfil with regards to
innovation communities’ needs, with regard to the stages of innovation and according to the
type of support (Table 8.2).
The support can be in the form of:
– supervised, i.e. intentionally led by support practitionners who manage one or more stages
of the innovation process according to strategic management principles and with the aim of
meeting identified learning needs;
– facilitated, through the creation of an enabling environment by helping networking and
coordinatation between actors, access to various innovation support services or obtain
funding.
The identified support mechanisms fulfil four major functions:
– the emergence of innovation communities through the generation of collective ideas and
by making actors willing to collaborate;
– the structuring of these communities by organizing collaborative work around a common
project and with a common vision;
– the creation of technical partnerships with services for supporting innovation thus
encouraging experimentation and the development of innovation;
– the creation of strategic partnerships to allow the scaling and the dissemination of
innovation through replication or its promotion at a political level by creating relationships
with key actors of change.
Table 8.2. Diversity of support mechanisms in the Global South, based on the type of support
chosen and the function performed.
Functions fulfilled by the support mechanism and examples
of activities
Styles of support
Facilitated support
Supervised support
Helping innovation
communities to
emerge and
develop
Communicating and raising awareness
about inventions (solutions) or social
issues (problems)
Creating spaces for designing
Stimulating the collective production of
new ideas: exposure to new knowledge,
confronting of paradoxes, exchanges
between peers
Organizing reflection and exchanges of
ideas
Science and society forum
(www.soscience.org)
Third-party areas for
experiments and meetings:
spaces for coworking, FabLab
Competitions and prizes for
innovative projects conducted
by pioneers
Action research in partnership or
co-design of innovations by
research teams
Ways to support project leaders in
scientific and technical training
institutes or innovation centres
Structuring
innovation
communities
Promoting collaborative leadership
Assisting with planning
Encouraging organizations to look
outside and encouraging participatory
learning
Providing methods and tools for
exploration or use
None
Projects to build up the innovation
capacity of actors
Projects based on the participatory
development of innovation
Communication agencies for
development, which will create
customized tools
Creating
partnerships with
innovation support
services for
experimentation
and development
Helping formulate needs for support
and funding
Helping identify donors and support
service providers
Organizing opportunities for meetings
between supply and demand
Creating mutual trust
Helping the contractualization and
formalization of partnerships
Technopoles, integrated
development hubs
Innovation Fairs, B2B(1),
innovation market
Science and society forum
Crowdfunding systems
Business clusters in a region
Process to support
businesses/start-ups in incubators
Multi-actor innovation platforms
oriented towards research and co-
designing of innovation
Customized support for innovative
projects: services provided by
private agencies or associations
Creating
mechanisms for
exchanges and
coordination for
purposes of scaling
Identify the key actors of change
Making them aware of the benefits of
innovation
Organizing opportunities for discussions
and meetings with the proponents of
the innovation
Roundtables for policies to
facilitate the emergence of
policies and standards for
incentivizing innovation
General public forum to
publicize innovative
experiences
Chain-specific innovation platform
to facilitate coordination between
actors
Organization of agricultural advice
for training and publicizing
innovative experiences
1. Business to business, i.e. commercial activities and marketing between companies.
Helping innovation communities to emerge and develop entails bringing together those who
have the problems and those who have the solutions, organizing reflections and exchanges,
providing tools and methods for generating collective ideas, and creating design spaces.
These are activities that can be found in projects of action research in partnership, in certain
types of innovation platforms or in innovation centres or private or public institutions
(technical training and research institutes). More recently, there has been an increase in new
spaces dedicated to the sharing of new ideas and to initial experiments, which are open to
all public categories. Examples include coworking spaces or FabLabs, often initiated by civil
society or the entrepreneurial sector.
The structuring of innovation communities must allow the community to function over time,
so that new ideas can become innovation projects. Support activities can include the
emergence and consolidation of leadership roles, planning or opening up of organizations
for helping them to align their strategy. Support mechanisms of this type are still rare. They
can sometimes be implemented by projects dedicated to capacity development.
The creation of technical partnerships with innovation support services facilitate the stages
of experimentation and development, i.e. help formulate support and funding needs, and
putting in contact with organizations that have suitable technical skills to design the
innovation. Certain infrastructures, such as technopoles, business clusters, or events such as
innovation fairs or markets, or, at a more virtual level, crowdfunding platforms, facilitate this
linkage. Incubators, usually from private entities, offer tailor-made support services adapted
to these types of needs.
The creation of strategic partnerships consists in identifying key actors of change, in political
or economic spheres, to raise their awareness and mobilize them so that they can make
available to the innovation communities the traditional support mechanisms for
disseminating innovation, such as training in formal education systems and extension
services. It is also a matter of mobilizing these actors to develop incentivizing regulatory
frameworks.
Some mechanisms can perform multiple functions with no coordination with other types of
mechanisms. For example, some innovation platforms tend to encompass all support
functions without forging alliances with other complementary systems, such as incubators or
existing advisory services. Thus, the incubation of innovative agrifood companies might be
complementary to innovation platforms that aimed at improving the organization of
production and sale of agricultural products.
Actors and professions of support
The different types of support mechanisms, as well as the nature of the innovations
supported, are dependent on the kind of actors providing the support, i.e. whether from civil
society, public services or private organizations.
Public or quasi-public mechanisms are mainly involved in the structuring and deployment of
collective capacities for undertaking innovation at the territorial level; these include
competitiveness clusters, technopoles, and technical and scientific training institutes. The
State uses mechanisms that are usually part of a planned management of innovation by
selecting the innovations deemed essential to meeting priority national challenges, such as
food security, the fight against climate change, and the creation of new chains or new
technologies (for example, genetically modified organisms, mechanization).
The private sector is increasingly positioning itself as a provider of customizable services,
offering to support an innovation over time by responding to changing support needs.
Business incubators or innovative collective projects in various supply chains and private
agencies specialized in organizing support programmes, with relatively customizable
toolboxes (for example, organization of events, creation of participatory videos) offer this
form of support. Short- or medium-term value creation should allow the funding of such
services and determines the type of innovations supported, which generally consist of
product innovations in value chains. These support services are expensive as the skills they
provide require a high level of expertise.
Civil society is involved primarily in the emergence and structuring of innovation
communities, and the innovations concerned are usually ‘responsible’ ones, in which ethics
dominate. These innovations usually focus on solving environmental and societal problems
by addressing the needs of the most disadvantaged populations. While the resources
available are few, they are used to create mechanisms to connect various existing initiatives,
such as advocacy, forums for exchanges and virtual networks.
The implementation of these various mechanisms for supporting innovation in the
agricultural sector in developing countries requires the creation of new professions and,
consequently, new reference standards for skills – which remain to be developed. For the
moment, it is mainly agricultural technicians and agricultural advisers who are mobilized,
because they are known to be capable of providing support to farms and rural development
activities. However, these skills are not enough. For example, the Global Forum for Rural
Advisory Services (GFRAS) is seeking to promote a new adviser profile that is more versatile
and open to managing actor collectives (Sulaiman and Davis, 2012). But many challenges are
yet to be met. While such an adviser can be responsive to farmers’ innovations, he can also
be perceived by farmers or by development project actors as being overly influenced by his
technical background, which may drive him to orient development processes towards
traditional themes, such as increasing production, and thus may fail to be sufficiently
attentive to the needs of innovating actors. Moreover, retraining agricultural advisers is
easier said than done, as vocational training courses are still scarce and often inadequate.
The professional profiles for facilitating collective innovation are, however, beginning to
emerge, especially in the context of the implementation of innovation platforms, but they
are still not very formalized. It is usually the consultants or service providers hired in
development projects that take on this role and are trained on an ad hoc basis by the
projects. While such an option has its advantages (knowledge and capacity to manage
participatory processes, neutrality and goodwill, especially towards the marginalized actors),
it also has its limitations (low legitimacy compared to the actors involved in innovation
situations, which makes it difficult to arouse the necessary willingness and commitment). In
the context of projects, the temporary status of a majority of the innovation facilitators does
not favour the continuity and reproducibility of support mechanisms. They stop their
activities at the end of projects and their know-how is neither transmitted nor made
permanent within an organization that had gained some visibility in the field of support.
Finding ways to anchor such processes or approaches, to obtain funding for them and to find
the necessary skills represent new challenges that the research community will have to
address.
Implications of research on supporting innovation in the
Global South
The research community currently assumes different roles in supporting innovation,
depending not only on the complexity of the situation, the needs expressed by actors, and
its own desire to accompany innovation, but also on its own capabilities. Toillier et al. (2017)
identify several possible roles: entrepreneur, translator, or expert. In the role of an
entrepreneur, the researcher mobilizes and engages the various actors around an innovation
project that he is promoting, and helps set up mechanisms (including platforms, networks,
partnerships) to manage the innovation situation over a long enough period of time for the
innovation to emerge and succeed. In the role of a translator, the researcher is involved in
defining the problem and the goals of the action, in the co-design of innovation and in the
strategy to manage the innovation process. However, tasks and responsibilities are shared,
and traditional and scientific knowledge are accorded equal importance. And finally, in the
role of an expert, he provides the specific knowledge needed to design the innovation,
without seeking to participate in its management.
However, researchers can also be excluded altogether from innovation situations. For
example, many development support agencies make effective use of action research, action-
training-research or farmer-based research methods, by making farmers and technicians
assume the roles of researchers and knowledge producers.
New fields of research need to be opened up in order to promote the emergence of
professions and mechanisms for supporting innovation. To begin with, it is necessary to
conduct research at the same time in the fields of human and social sciences and
management sciences on the transformation of traditional support and advisory services in
agriculture, in view of the desire to involve them in mechanisms for supporting innovation.
Considered in a broader sense, other issues also assume importance. Under what conditions
can organizations acquire support skills and offer sustainable services? What roles can
public-private partnerships play in these new types of services and mechanisms so that they
are able to support all types of innovations, even those that do not generate profits?
Furthermore, there is a lack of sufficient knowledge on supporting innovations and this
lacuna has to be addressed. Won’t the cultural or organizational specificities in the countries
of the Global South compel us to consider support in a particular way? How can different
types of learning at the individual and organizational levels be combined in contexts in which
actors do not know how to innovate together? Is an external actor always needed to
facilitate or support an innovation process?
The coordination mechanisms of existing systems also need to be examined, depending on
the innovation situations and innovation phases, so as to allow the creation of systems for
accompanying innovation which cover all support needs.
Finally, it is a matter of producing new tools and approaches, together with the actors of
support, in order to better respond to the diversity and complexity of innovation situations.
This entails an operational production which, when it is part of an intervention research
1
approach, also helps produce new knowledge on the analysis of change and to carry out,
with the actors, reflective analyses of support practices.
This kind of work applied in the agricultural sector in the Global South, where
available resources, values and ethical concerns are different from those in the
Global North, remain rare, not only because of its novelty, but also because of the
difficulties in accessing data, and in ensuring the acceptance of intervention research
on the management itself of the innovation by being present when the innovation is
being carried out.
Conclusion: towards pluralistic systems for supporting
innovation
The analysis of the evolution of thought frameworks shows that innovation support on in the
countries of the Global South has followed the evolution of development paradigms, which
range from training farmers for technology transfers to facilitating exchanges within multi-
actor innovation networks. The managerial perspective, enriched by contributions on
processes of learning, makes it possible to put humans and individuals back at the centre: to
support innovation is to support the actors of innovation, which implies taking interest in
their abilities to learn, their progress and their needs in order to adapt tools and support
methods to the concerned stage of the innovation process.
The panorama of existing support mechanisms that we have painted is admittedly not
exhaustive, but it does provide an insight into their diversity and can help identify gaps in
systems for supporting innovation at the country or regional levels. On the one hand, some
support functions along an innovation process are less developed than others. And on the
other, certain functions cannot be fulfilled by the traditional actors of agricultural research
and extension, making it necessary to involve new private sector entities, such as business
1
Intervention research aims to generate both practical knowledge useful for action, as well as more
general theoretical knowledge (David, 2000).
incubators or communication agencies. This not only leads to a rethinking of the roles to be
played by the private and public sectors, civil society and research entities in the provision of
this support, but also of modalities of coordination between these plurality of actors in order
to align services and the skills and tools to be mobilized for fulfilling each function.
The research community can contribute to a praxeology of the support
2
of innovation in
agriculture by offering methods and tools that make it possible to reflect on and propose an
organization of the support for innovation, and to develop the professions of support. The
challenge is to produce knowledge on support processes themselves in order to help outline
the modalities of collaboration between different organizations, create new types of support
mechanisms, or mobilize various existing support mechanisms by showing the
complementarities that exist between them for a given innovation situation. Theoretical
frameworks remain to be built on the basis of field experiments with the actors of support,
as well as on knowledge obtained from research on the management of innovation in other
domains.
The chapters that follow illustrate the different roles that researchers can play in innovation
(Chapter 9), the tools and approaches proposed by researchers for the design of agricultural
innovation (Chapter 10), the evolution of agricultural advisory services in how they take the
project of change and the farmers’ capacity building needs into account (Chapter 11), and,
finally, the support of multi-actor innovation by two different intervention methods (Chapter
12).
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