UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia
Sulaiman V. Rasheed, Andy Hall & T.S. Vamsidhar Reddy #2011-050This 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.
Key words: Research Into Use, Innovation Management, Agricultural
Research, Innovation, Development, Policy, Value Chain Development,
South Asia, Innovation Trajectory
JEL Codes: L26, L31, L33, N5, N55, O13, O19, O21, O22, O31, O32, O33,
O53, Q13, Q16
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