Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

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Abstract:

In this paper, I use an autobiographical approach to tell the story of innovation and its changing fortunes and uses. I have lived through the major approaches and perspectives in the past 50 years and have played some role in them myself. The paper starts off with my early days with the diffusion of innovations and the agricultural treadmill in the Mid-West of the US where those theories emerged and became dominant. I then turn those ideas around by reporting on my involvement in a test of a not-for-profit marketing approach to innovation in Kenya that featured Innovating Laggards. A further turn-about occurred when indigenous knowledge and endogenous development became key dimensions of innovation. Farmers are the experts. I became closely familiar with attempts to foster innovation through collaboration between farmers and scientists in Participatory Technology Development. My work on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS) made me sensitive to the Farmer Field School and Landcare. Both practically operationalised the idea, that innovation emerges from interaction among stakeholders. I end the paper with reporting on the Convergence of Sciences (CoS) Programme in which I am a member of the Scientific Coordination Committee. During its first phase, CoS established a pathway for an agricultural science that can improve the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers. But that phase also showed that technical innovation within very small windows of opportunity can only have limited impact. It further demonstrated the need for, and possibility of, institutional development. This finding allowed us in CoS2 to focus on innovation systems as an approach to institutional development that stretches the windows of opportunity for small-scale farmers.