© 2008 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ The World Bank

By: Riikka Rajalahti, Willem Janssen, Eija Pehu

Executive Summary
Agricultural development depends to a great extent on how successfully knowledge is generated and applied, and indeed knowledge intensiveness has featured prominently in most strategies to promote agricultural development. Yet the changing context for agricultural development has highlighted a strong need to understand and adopt innovation systems thinking.
An innovation system can be defined as a network of organizations, enterprises, and individuals that focuses on bringing new products, new processes, and new forms of organization into economic use, together with the institutions and policies that affect their behavior and performance. The innovation systems concept extends beyond the creation of knowledge to encompass the factors affecting demand for and use of knowledge in novel and useful ways. Innovation systems not only help to create knowledge; they provide access to knowledge, share knowledge, and foster learning. Given the diversity and context-specificity of innovation systems approaches, in March 2007 the World Bank organized a workshop in which about 80 experts (representing donor agencies, development and related agencies, academia, and the World Bank) took stock of recent experiences with innovation systems in agriculture and reconsidered strategies for their future development. This paper summarizes the workshop findings and uses them to develop and discuss key issues in applying the innovation systems concept. The workshop’s recommendations, including next steps for the wider innovation systems community, are also presented.

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