Elsevier

Agricultural Systems

Volume 118, June 2013, Pages 65-77
Agricultural Systems

Unravelling the role of innovation platforms in supporting co-evolution of innovation: Contributions and tensions in a smallholder dairy development programme

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2013.03.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Innovation platforms support co-evolution of innovation.

  • Innovation platforms can be considered sets of intermediaries.

  • Dynamism and unpredictability of innovation requires platforms to be adaptive.

  • Feedback and learning in platforms needs to be better monitored.

  • Agricultural innovation policies should be better tailored to co-evolution.

Abstract

The agricultural innovation systems approach emphasizes the collective nature of innovation and stresses that innovation is a co-evolutionary process, resulting from alignment of technical, social, institutional and organizational dimensions. These insights are increasingly informing interventions that focus on setting up multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as innovation platforms and networks, as mechanisms for enhancing agricultural innovation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. There has been much emphasis on how such platforms are organized, but only limited analysis unravelling how they shape co-evolution of innovation processes. This paper addresses this gap and conceptualizes platforms as intermediaries that connect the different actors in innovation systems in order to foster effective co-evolution. We present a case study of a smallholder dairy development programme in Kenya, led by a consortium of five organizations that provide a platform for building multi-actor partnerships to enhance smallholder dairy productivity and improve livelihoods. The findings indicate that co-evolution of innovation is a highly dynamic process with various interactional tensions and unexpected effects, and that the distributed nature of intermediation is important in resolving some of these tensions emerging at different actor interfaces. However, platforms are not always able to adapt adequately to emerging issues. This points to the need to look at platforms dynamically and pay more attention to mechanisms that strengthen feedback, learning and adaptive management in innovation processes.

Introduction

Smallholder agricultural development in developing countries faces challenges and constraints related to persistent food insecurity, food price volatility, food safety and sustainability concerns, but also is experiencing increased opportunities arising from growing domestic and global agricultural market demand (McCullough et al., 2008, World Bank, 2006, World Bank, 2007). Such a dynamic context requires the sector to continually innovate if it is to contribute to sustainable socio-economic development. In this regard, the agricultural innovation systems (AIS) approach has gained currency as a framework for understanding bottlenecks and identifying opportunities for enhancing the innovation capacity of agricultural systems, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Hounkonnou et al., 2012, Spielman et al., 2009, Sumberg, 2005, World Bank, 2006).

AIS thinking recognizes that innovation occurs through the collective interplay among many actors – including farmers, researchers, extension officers, traders, service providers, processors, development organizations – and is influenced by factors such as technology, infrastructure, markets, policies, rules and regulations, and cultural practices (actors’ values and norms). Thus, innovations are not just about technology but also include social and institutional change, and have a systemic and co-evolutionary nature (Biggs, 1990, Leeuwis and van den Ban, 2004). Co-evolution entails mutual interaction and adaptation over time between the technological, social and institutional components of an innovation, and therefore innovation cannot be understood and managed by separating these different components (Edquist and Johnson, 1997, Ekboir, 2003, Hall and Clark, 2010, Nelson and Nelson, 2002). However, co-evolution does not mean seamless and smooth evolution, but is accompanied by tensions and sometimes incongruent actions that affect the outcomes of complex innovation processes (Leeuwis and Aarts, 2011, Smits, 2002).

Following the AIS perspective, the importance of recognizing and stimulating co-evolution has been noted as key to promoting smallholder agricultural development in SSA, and interventions increasingly focus on supporting interaction among multiple actors at different levels in agricultural production systems and value chains to enable innovation and enhance livelihoods (Ayele et al., 2012, Dormon et al., 2007, Hounkonnou et al., 2012). Such multi-actor arrangements have been captured using different concepts and terminology, such as coalitions (Biggs, 1990); innovation configurations (Engel, 1995); innovation networks (Leeuwis and van den Ban, 2004); public–private partnerships (PPPs) (Hall et al., 2001, Spielman et al., 2010); and innovation platforms (Adekunle and Fatunbi, 2012, Nederlof et al., 2011). While these concepts are similar in their emphasis on understanding innovation as an interactive and collective process, they are mostly used as analytical concepts rather than intervention approaches, with the exception of innovation platforms and PPPs, although the latter has mainly been described in the context of research collaboration (see e.g. Spielman et al., 2010, Hall et al., 2001). In this paper, we use the concept of innovation platforms, which generally have wider application in the agricultural field. We define an innovation platform as a multi-actor configuration deliberately set up to facilitate and undertake various activities around identified agricultural innovation challenges and opportunities, at different levels in agricultural systems (e.g. village, country, sector or value chain).

Recent studies from SSA have shown that multi-stakeholder platforms are contributing to agricultural innovation, citing enhanced interdependence among actors and enhanced social capital as some contributory factors (Nederlof et al., 2011, Tenywa et al., 2011, van Rijn et al., 2012). Although these studies often point to issues such as platform composition, governance and facilitation, they do not provide a clear understanding of how and why these platforms shape the innovation process and contribute to the outcomes. Thus, innovation platforms largely remain ‘black boxes’. To better understand innovation processes and how to support them through platforms, there is need for more robust analysis of the dynamics of co-evolution and the role of change agents in the process (Hounkonnou et al., 2012, Waters-Bayer et al., 2009). This paper aims to fill this gap by unravelling how platforms shape and contribute to innovation processes, through a case study of the East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) programme in Kenya. The EADD programme provides a platform for stimulating multi-stakeholder collaboration aimed at improving productivity and incomes of smallholder dairy producer households.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 draws a conceptual framework that links the concepts of co-evolution and innovation platform in order to provide an analytical framework to unravel innovation platforms. This is followed by a presentation of the research design in Section 3. We present the findings in Section 4, followed by a discussion of the merits and limitations of innovation platforms in supporting co-evolution of innovation. We end with conclusions in Section 6, where we highlight some theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Section snippets

Conceptual framework

This section first discusses the concept of co-evolution and innovation platforms as innovation intermediaries. We then combine these concepts to build an analytical framework in order to better elucidate the dynamics of co-evolution of innovation process.

Background of the EADD programme

The smallholder-dominated dairy sector in Kenya is considered to be relatively successful in the SSA context, but the sector still contends with many challenges that have limited its potential in terms of productivity, competitiveness and improving livelihoods (Moll et al., 2007, Muriuki et al., 2003, Technoserve, 2008). To tackle these challenges, the EADD multi-actor programme was initiated in 2008. The EADD is being implemented in three countries in East Africa: Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, but

Findings

In this section, we describe the process of how EADD established and executed the programme, distilling from this description the components of the co-evolution of the innovation processes on the platform, and highlight some of the issues and tensions that emerged as the process unfolded. We also examine the role of intermediaries in the processes, using the six intermediation functions described in the conceptual framework in Section 2. Quotes derived from the interviews are used to illustrate

Innovation platforms synchronize mutually reinforcing developments through distributed intermediation

The findings indicate how the innovation platform shaped the innovation process in addressing the various system weaknesses which had been impeding the enhancement of smallholder dairy farming and contributed to outcomes in relation to access to services and inputs and improved productivity. The strength of EAAD as an innovation platform was in sequentially (but with recurring and sometimes simultaneous attention to the same issues if needed) implementing combinations of technical and social

Conclusion

This paper has demonstrated how innovation platforms are important mechanisms for stimulating and coordinating co-evolution of innovation. A main implication of our study for theory is that the co-evolving nature of innovation processes requires a conceptualization of platforms as dynamic and distributed networks instead of static and centralized networks. They have a nested structure comprising different intermediary actors who build bridges between the different components in innovation

Acknowledgements

We extend our appreciation to various individuals within the EADD-Kenya team, the many farmers and other collaborating actors for their time and co-operation during the research. We also acknowledge ILRI for hosting the first author as a graduate fellow and specifically thank Isabelle Baltenweck for the invaluable support during the fieldwork period. The constructive comments of anonymous reviewers were very helpful in improving the article. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of

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