This paper sets out to explore the nature of new organisational and institutional vehicles for managing innovation in order to put research into use for social gain. It has reviewed four classes of such vehicles found in South Asia. The first two - contract farming and organised retailing -...

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...

This paper is a synthesis of research undertaken as part of the Research Into Use programme (RIU) to explore the question of how agricultural research can be used more effectively to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihoods in developing countries. Many of the challenges the...

The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a...

There are divergent views on what capacity development might mean in relation to agricultural biotechnology. The core of this debate is whether this should involve the development of human capital and research infrastructure, or whether it should encompass a wider range of activities which also...

In this paper, using the case of seeds, we explore the existence of both new opportunities and new challenges for innovation in Natural Resource Based Industries NRBIs in developing countries. Conventional views construe NRBIs as low tech, with low technological dynamism, little innovation, and...

The emergence of a globalised knowledge economy, and the contemporary views of innovation capacity that this trend enables and informs, provides a new context in which development assistance to agricultural research and development needs to be considered. The main argument in this paper, which...