Implementation

The AIS is increasingly recognised as a useful framework to diagnose innovation capacity, design investments, and organise interventions that appear most likely to promote agricultural innovation and equitable growth. The AIS framework can be applied at various levels: country, sector, or project/intervention level. However, most of the essential steps in using the AIS framework remain the same.

Diagnosing innovation capacity

For initiatives that focus on strengthening innovation capacity, diagnosis of the AIS is the starting point. A four element tool for diagnosing innovation capacity (5)

1. Actors and their roles: What actors are relevant for agricultural innovation and what roles do they play? Are they sources of technical knowledge or engaged in value addition, output marketing, social mobilisation, institutional development, policy advocacy, coordination, or networking? 
2. Patterns of interaction that exist between different players: Are certain actors better connected? Are key organisations isolated or well integrated into the wider set of activities and organisation in the system? How are these organisations linked? 
3. Institutions: What are the habits, practices, traditions, and routines that cause organisations to behave the way they do with respect to how well they link? Do patterns of social, economic, and political power influence the way organisations work and how does this impact patterns of interaction? 
4. Enabling environment: What are the key technical, policy, marketing, and environmental challenges and opportunities being faced? Are there science and technology policies to promote collaboration, to promote application of knowledge? How far do the different actors shape or influence the policy processes? 

Facilitating interactions and knowledge flows among the selected actors

The diagnosis of an AIS provides insights on the nature of barriers that constrain interaction and the opportunities that could be strengthened to promote interaction. There are several ways to promote interaction. 

• Innovation platforms: Innovation platforms are increasingly used to bring different actors together to discuss and negotiate collective or coordinated action. (7)
  Posthumus, H. and Wongtschowski, M. 2014. Innovation platforms. Note 1, GFRAS Good Practice Notes for Extension and Advisory Services. Lindau, Switzerland: GFRAS.
   They comprise various actors who communicate, cooperate, and carry out activities needed for innovation to occur. Platforms can exist at multiple levels. Local platforms tend to address specific problems or opportunities such as improving the efficiency of a specific value chain. Platforms at national or regional levels often set the agenda for agricultural development and allow stakeholders, including farmers through their representatives, to influence policies. Several such platforms were set up under the aegis of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa and DFID’s Research Into Use programme in Africa. (8)
  Ibid.
• Innovation brokering: Any advisory service or related individual or organisation can broker, connecting farmers to service providers and other actors in the agricultural food chain. Recent years have witnessed greater interest in investing in innovation brokering. Innovation brokering differs from traditional extension and research because it represents the institutionalisation of the facilitation role, with a broad, systemic, multi-actor, innovation systems perspective. (9)
  Klerxx, L. and Glidemacher, P. 2012. The role of innovation brokers in agricultural innovation systems. In: Agricultural innovation systems: an investment source book. Washington DC: The World Bank.
• Innovation grants: Funding (competitive grants/ matching grants) is often used to incentivise collaboration and joint action among different actors in the AIS. For instance, in India, the National Agricultural Innovation Project funded promising multi-stakeholder consortiums and research alliances comprising organisations from the public, private, and non-government organisation (NGO) sector through a competitive process. The consortium members were jointly responsible for governance, design, and implementation of these programmes. Similarly, the Food & Business Applied Research Fund of the Netherlands provides grants for applied research contributing to innovation for food security and private sector development only to consortia having local practitioners and researchers. 
• Innovation management: Innovation involves a wide range of functions, activities, and tools performed by agencies that work through platforms, alliances, or partnerships, collectively referred to as innovation management. While facilitating access to technology is important in putting new research-derived knowledge into use, it has value only when it is bundled together with other innovation-management tasks (Table 1). (10)
  Sulaiman, V.R., Hall, A. and Vamsidhar Reddy, T.S. 2014. Innovation management: a new framework for enabling agricultural innovation. Productivity, 55 (2): 140–148.
   Identifying the right actors with different capacities is important for enabling innovation. 

Facilitating policy changes

• Policy working groups: Accelerating institutional and policy changes is critical for innovation. Organising policy working groups comprising key policy influencers around a specific theme can help in accelerating policy changes that enable innovation. Working groups can also help bridge knowledge–practice–policy gaps through a shared understanding of the role of different actors and facilitate development of coherence around different policy instruments. 
• Sector coordination agencies: Coordination and collective action are important for innovation. In many countries, organisations for coordination at the national level exist (e.g. apex research councils and commodity boards). Though they rarely coordinate activities of actors or prioritise investments for innovation, they could play a useful role, if adequately capacitated. 
• Innovation support facility: In situations where the national agencies lack the mandate and capacity for coordinated action for innovation, new structures or facilities to support innovation must be established. Such facilities should have a national mandate and adequate funding. The facility should have capacity to govern the wide range of stakeholders, experiment with different approaches, monitor and evaluate outcomes, assess impacts, influence policies, and support learning. The Agricultural Research and Development Support Facility established in Papua New Guinea is a good example of this type of facility. (11)
  Mbabu, A.N. and Hall, A. (eds). 2012. Capacity building for agricultural research for development lessons from practice in Papua New Guinea.
  Maastrict, The Netherlands: UNU-MERIT.

Table 1. Innovation management tasks observed in Research Into Use Asia projects

Extension and AIS

Extension and advisory services (EAS) are integral to the AIS. The great value of the AIS framework for extension is that it allows the role and organisation of extension to be understood as part of a wider canvas of actors, processes, institutions, and policies that are critical for innovation. EAS could better contribute to the process of innovation if they would expand their conventional technology transfer role by including more functions, especially related to facilitation, brokering, and enhancing the capacity of the actors in the AIS to provide integrated support to farmers. (12)

• organising producers and the rural poor and building their capacities to deal with production, natural resource management and marketing challenges, and also promoting farmer-to-farmer exchange of information
• building coalitions or platforms to facilitate development of consortia of different organisations to address specific issues (e.g. value chain development, participatory irrigation management, etc.) and also for information sharing and learning. 

This means that EAS would have to interact and partner with a wide range of organisations dealing with markets, policy, financing, and also with sources of technical knowledge. But to play these roles it needs new capacities at different levels. (13)