Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia

Sulaiman, Rasheed, Hall, Andy and Reddy, T.S. Vamsidhar (2011). Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia. UNU-MERIT.

Document type:
Report

Metadata
Documents
Versions
Statistics
  • Attached Files (Some files may be inaccessible until you login with your UNU Collections credentials)
    Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads
    wp2011-050.pdf PDF application/pdf 265.43KB
  • Sub-type Working paper
    Author Sulaiman, Rasheed
    Hall, Andy
    Reddy, T.S. Vamsidhar
    Title Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia
    Publication Date 2011
    Place of Publication Maastricht, NL
    Publisher UNU-MERIT
    Pages 51
    Abstract This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on agricultural innovation were "not put into use" in the programme's implementation. However, the experience provides three important lessons for donors and governments to make use of agricultural research: (i) Promoting research into use requires enabling innovation. This goes beyond fostering collaboration, and includes a range of other innovation management tasks (ii) The starting point for making use of research need not necessarily be the promising research products and quite often identifying the promising innovation trajectories is more rewarding (iii) Strengthening the innovation enabling environment of policies and institutions is critical if research use is to lead to long-term and large-scale impacts. It is in respect of this third point that RIU Asia missed its target, as it failed to make explicit efforts to address policy and institutional change, despite its innovation systems rhetoric. This severely restricted its ability to achieve wide-scale social and economic impact that was the original rationale for the programme.
    Keyword Research into use
    Innovation management
    Agricultural research
    Innovation
    Development
    Policy
    Value chain development
    South Asia
    Innovation trajectories
    JEL L26
    L31
    L33
    N5
    N55
    O13
    O19
    O21
    O22
    O31
    O32
    O33
    O53
    Q13
    Q16
    Copyright Holder UNU-MERIT
    Copyright Year 2011
    Copyright type All rights reserved
  • Versions
    Version Filter Type
  • Citation counts
    Google Scholar Search Google Scholar
    Access Statistics: 716 Abstract Views, 185 File Downloads  -  Detailed Statistics
    Created: Wed, 11 Dec 2013, 17:00:00 JST