Principles for enabling partnership-based innovation

Partners:
National Centre for Agriculture and Policy Research (NCAP), India
International Crops Research Institute, India
Agricultural Products Export Development Authority, India
International Development Enterprises, India

Problem:
This output came from a series of both technical and policy research projects conducted between 1995 and 2003.  The technical projects acted as a vehicle to observe the way technology development and uptake were affected by the composition and behaviour of various groupings of organisations involved.  The policy research project at the heart of this output pioneered the use of the innovation systems concept in agriculture, adapting, applying and testing it through a series of cases studies of other research projects and wider experiences of agricultural innovation in India.

The research that led to this output emerged from issues raised by two trends important in the contemporary rural development context across the developing world. The first trend is the increasing recognition that partnership between research and enterprise and developmental organisations in the public and private sectors is a potentially important way of i) linking research with the needs of technology users in different operational contexts; and ii) uptake and use of technology needs the active involvement of non-research organisations as ultimately they the one who need to incorporate new ideas and technology into their production process/enterprise or service.  The second trend was that creating the partnerships and linkages was recognised as being much more difficult than anticipated with large barriers to partnership arising from historically rooted ways of doing things; and even where some degree of partnership was possible, often these ways of doing things meant that inclusion of poor people and their agendas was not guaranteed. 

Achievements:
This output contains a conceptual framework and policy advice aimed at (i) improving the responsiveness of research to needs of different technology users; (ii) improving the integration of research into the wider set of activities where research findings and technology are put into use; (iii) improving the habits, routines and practices (collectively referred to as institutions) that shape the relationships that in turn facilitate this integration and create the patterns of interaction between research, entrepreneurial and developmental organisations and individuals involved in the process of innovation.  In this context innovation is understood to be both the creation, diffusion and adaptation of knowledge and, critically, the putting into use of this knowledge in socially and economically significant ways.   

The value of this output is that it provides analytical and planning principles that (i) reveals the diversity of organisations that are needed to ensure that research contributes effectively to the wider process of innovation; (ii) it brings relationships and institutional issues – i.e. habits, routines and practices – into the centre of the analysis and by doing so reveals some of the underlying reasons why partnerships are difficult to establish and sustain and why innovation often fails to take place.   With partnership becoming central strategy for making more effective use of research in the development process, this output has importance in providing principles on how this could be facilitated.