Bringing New Ideas into Practice: Experiments with Agricultural Innovation. Learning from Research Into Use in Africa

African smallholder farmers need to intensify their production systems and adapt to continuous, often unforeseen and sudden changes in their environment—this requires continuous innovation.

How then to best invest resources to support agricultural innovation? In this book, lessons are shared from Research Into Use (RIU) in Africa, a United Kingdom Department for International Development funded program. The program is aimed at stimulating rural economic development by enhancing agricultural innovation.

This book analyzes the experiences of three RIU Africa Country Programmes, which used innovation platforms to facilitate innovation, and two best-bet projects, which used a competitive funding mechanism to support private sector driven initiatives to get research outcomes into use.

The analysis of the five cases allowed for the development of an analytical model that can assist in decision-making on investments in agricultural innovation. Interventions aimed at agricultural development through innovation would do well to consider two types of results: household level impact at scale and an improved capacity to innovate. Three interlinked components—needs and opportunity identification, experimentation and bringing into routine use—were distinguished to analyze the process of getting from new ideas to impact at scale. The roles of different stakeholders are discussed.