innovation platforms

This article describes the process, the results, challenges, and lessons emanating from applying integrated agricultural landscape management (IALM) processes in innovation platforms. Integrated landscape management is a process for achieving multiple objectives related to agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, and sustainable natural resource management. »

Marc Schut from the CGIAR International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Wageningen University recently published a book with Guidelines for Innovation Platforms. In his blog he highlights the need to think more critically about when, how and in what form Innovation Platforms can meaningfully contribute to agricultural development impacts. »

This publication provides guidelines for creating successful innovation platforms in agricultural research for development (AR4D). Innovation Platforms are an increasingly popular approach to enhancing multi-stakeholder collaboration in AR4D programmes. »

Innovation platforms (IPs) form a popular vehicle in agricultural research for development (AR4D) to facilitate stakeholder interaction, agenda setting, and collective action toward sustainable agricultural development. This article in the Science and Public Policy Journal, aims to systematically research the dynamics of stakeholder composition throughout IPs and tries to analyze how seven ‘key functions’ of the innovation process are fulfilled. »

Increasingly, value chain approaches are integrated with multi-stakeholder processes to facilitate inclusive innovation and value chain upgrading of smallholders. This pathway to smallholder integration into agri-food markets has received limited analysis. This article in the The European Journal of Development Research analyses this integration through a case study of an ongoing smallholder dairy development programme in Tanzania. »

This article in the Ghana Journal of Science, Technology and Development, highlights the role of innovation platforms for resilience thinking. In this paper, the concept of resilience is approached from the perspective of socio-ecological systems dynamics. In particular, the study examined the contribution of farmers to research towards enhanced resilience of traditional African vegetable production systems in northern Ghana. An Innovation Platform was set up as a ‘knowledge space’ that provided an enabling environment for the interaction between farmers’ indigenous and researchers’ scientific knowledge in agricultural research. »