• 2009 Small Grants Competition

    to adopt a cross-learning and iterative approach that will enable all researchers to learn from each other across different types of bio-innovation throughout the region.

  • Overview of the Project

    to enhance biological innovative capabilities, policies & institutions to support just, equitable & sustainable social & economic development in developing countries.

  • Bio-innovations in the NEWS

    Policy briefs and articles on relevant dimensions of bio-innovation.

Enabling bioinnovation for poverty allevation in Asia.

Enhancing Agricultural Innovation: How to Go Beyond the Strengthening of Research Systems

©2007 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank

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Investments in knowledge—especially in the form of science and technology— have featured prominently and consistently in most strategies to promote sustainable and equitable agricultural development at the national level. Although many of these investments have been successful, the context for agriculture is changing rapidly, sometimes radically.

Six changes in the context for agricultural development heighten the need to examine how innovation occurs in the agricultural sector:

  1. Markets, not production, increasingly drive agricultural development.

  2. The production, trade, and consumption environment for agriculture and agricultural products is growing more dynamic and evolving in unpredictable ways.

  3. Knowledge, information, and technology increasingly are generated, diffused, and applied through the private sector.

  4. Exponential growth in information and communications technology has transformed the ability to take advantage of knowledge developed in other places or for other purposes.

  5. The knowledge structure of the agricultural sector in many countries is changing markedly.

  6. Agricultural development increasingly takes place in a globalized setting.

    Can new perspectives on the sources of agricultural innovation yield practical approaches to agricultural development that may be more suited to this changing context? That is the central question explored here.

 

 

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