Innovation for Fashion or Action? Building Innovation Capacity

This book is about the challenges and practical realities of building the capacity to innovate. It describes the experiences of the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, a fi ve-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. Specifi cally, it explores diff erent approaches through which innovation capacities were built. One approach was to establish and support innovation platforms (IPs) – an approach increasingly advocated as a way to broker linkages and facilitate interaction between multiple stakeholders in order to enable agricultural innovation. Originally, IPs were intended to help put existing research fi ndings into use for developmental purposes in Africa. The purpose of this book is to describe lessons from these experiences for practitioners and policy-makers in the national and international arenas who are planning and implementing investments to enable agricultural innovation.