In other words, it was necessary for farmers, foresters and/or their organisations to be involved in the co-innovation process, usually as participants in the core partnership, although substantial engagement could occasionally be achieved in other ways in some other actor configurations (such as networks). This equates in the EU SCAR (2012) visual depiction of the AKIS (see 9) to knowledge sharing between farmers and the (mainly public sector) education and research institutes, and advisory services, a reflection of the persistent linear approach to innovation described above. 2015). Key: I: innovation; K: acquisition of new knowledge; C: communication/outreach; F: fulfilment of initial expectations. She has supervised many students at the Ph.D. and master's-levels on a wide range of research projects carried out in different countries in Africa. The call for entries was widely publicised by the consortium partners through many channels, including the farming, rural, policy and local media, within EU Member States and several neighbouring countries, and attracted 175 eligible entries from 20 countries. dealers) among pesticide users to promote safer use practices. 24 0 obj Finally, the quality of the published description had to allow an assessment of whether the activity was likely to be insightful in terms of yielding useful information. Other facilitators, such as innovation brokers and champion farmers, should also be encouraged to consider options for co-innovation beyond the EIP-AGRI. The insights gained into the. Our data suggest that many of these are effective methods of supporting co-innovation and are, therefore, sharing the space within the AKIS. This is an important topic for further research in order to understand how effective participation could be better incentivised or supported. OGs and Interreg). 6 0 obj Percentage of each type of project and non-project activity including a specific type of actor in the consortium (or equivalent). For this reason, the potential success of the co-innovation process, the issue that was arguably the most sensitive to cultural interpretation, was assessed both by the interviewees (according to four criteria) and the interviewers. transfers, and the responsiveness of AKS to broader policy objectives. This illustrates the need to recognise and maintain the diversity of co-innovation opportunities for AKIS actors so as to ensure that a wide range of challenges is tackled by different types of solutions. 2015) themselves can also foster co-innovation. IT providers) is also quite strongly represented in the reviewed projects, notably H2020 RIAs, LIFE+ and LIFE projects, and non-project activities. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. The concept was operationalised into policy mainly by the Standing Committee of Agricultural Research (SCAR) Strategic Working Group (SWG) on AKIS (EU SCAR 2012 and subsequent publications) in consultation with the European Commissions (EC) Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI). Increase user participation in co-innovation and capitalise on any competitive advantage of particular types of intervention to appeal to harder-to-reach groups. Overall, the study found library users' wayfinding behavior to be generally inconsistent over time, but that there are users who stick to predominant segments (those segments used heavily to connect two particular nodes, or stops). 2020). This result may in part be a consequence of the continuing strong emphasis in policy discourse (and in the content of databases) on the research/researcher-led co-innovation paradigm. H2020 RIAs had on average the largest consortia with almost 80 per cent of the reviewed projects having 21 partners or more. <>stream
Barriers to user co-design of and participation in farming programmes include lack of time (farmers are too busy), policy and bureaucracy, the digital divide, geographical factors (at a local/regional level such as remote areas with poor communications), lack of social capital, lack of trust, low income, age, farm type and learning disabilities (Hurley et al. Table 1. AppendPDF Pro 6.3 Linux 64 bit Aug 30 2019 Library 15.0.4 when encountering a new pest). This leads to many challenges in the management of electronic library resources. For over one hundred years, Land Grant Universities (LGUs) have pushed the frontiers of knowledge; have translated new knowledge into practice for the benefit of farmers, agribusiness and consumers; and have prepared the next generation of agricultural scientists and entrepreneurs. (2012). By contrast, other programmes might consult with users and their representative organisations on how to make them, literally, more user friendly. On average, our interviewees scored the potential success of their co-innovation activity highly, while the interviewers assessed the level of co-innovation as being medium or high in over 90 per cent of instances (Table 4). Only 10 per cent of the projects and 3 per cent of the non-project activities were judged to involve only a low level of co-innovation. Using an ethnographic approach, we conducted 46 semi-structured interviews, 15 on-farm observations and 302 structured questionnaire interviews with farmers in Wakiso District, Uganda, in 2017. The mean score among the 200 projects was 8.2 for innovation, 7.7 for research and acquisition of new knowledge, 7.8 for communication and outreach, and 8.1 for success of implementation (i.e. Extension 3.0: Managing Agricultural Knowledge Systems in the Network Age a Additional OGs not included in the EIP-AGRI database. Creating synergies between policies and programmes remains challenging but provides potential for improved and differentiated involvement of users. The same system of categorisation of actors was applied to the coordinators of innovation partnerships. Based on these assertions, we make three general recommendations that are addressed primarily to the EC, as well as national and (where appropriate) sub-national policy-makers and policy implementers. Also, the same multi-actor partnerships may be active in different types of projects (e.g. Informal co-innovation networks that adopt a localised approach and are more bureaucratically light than project consortia are attractive alternative options for some groups of actors. Hilda M. Munyua holds a Ph.D. from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Key: M: marketing; N: organisational; O: other; P: process; S: social; T: product. A helpful step would be to explore the potential for common actions between existing expert contact points, such as the EUs National Contact Points for the H2020, Interreg and LIFE programmes, on the cross-cutting theme of co-innovation. Product innovation is especially common among the non-project activities without funding, which again may reflect expectations of an early financial return on investment. 2022-05-02T15:02:37-07:00 (2016) observed that only several thousand farms, i.e. Culture is found to play an important role in the perception and recall of information. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies. The involvement of some groups of actors (G, N) as formal partners is especially low in our sampled H2020 projects and OGs, and non-EIP-AGRI options may be better suited to fostering co-innovation between these actors and farmers and foresters. 773418. Consequently, the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) was introduced as a tool to speed up innovation in agriculture, forestry and rural development and to create synergies between different policy programmes both at the EU and Member State level (DG AGRI 2018). The full details of the methodology1 are described in Munyua and Stilwell (2010). Figure 6. It might also reflect a distinction between the implicit EIP-AGRI focus on innovation as some kind of broad public good and the private good approach of food chain actors. User participation in project consortia is to be encouraged, but this is not the only option for participation in co-innovation. Conversely, information on organic strategies was provided through external sources (e.g. This paper assesses user involvement in a diverse set of European Union (EU)-funded and non-EU (formal and informal) multi-actor partnerships. Third is the Eurocentric way of knowing. The Korean subjects show higher ratings for perceptions of information in a high-context design compared to the American subjects. The H2020 projects are relatively evenly distributed across the challenges. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. In fact, farmers may be aware of an innovation but conclude that it is not in their best interests to adopt it (Hoffman 2005). The findings of this study may benefit information professionals who are looking for effective ways of conveying information to intended audiences. 58 0 obj They were termed under-the-radar activities as many of them were not included in published databases and/or not known to EU and/or national policy-makers. 205-216, Library & Information Science Research, Volume 35, Issue 3, 2013, pp. These two groups are however somewhat less dominant as regards coordinating H2020 TNs. endobj Our data also suggest, however, that although the reviewed partnerships can between them address a wide range of challenges, solutions and innovations, certain types of partnerships can more strongly promote the inclusion of specific groups of AKIS actors (e.g. 36 0 obj To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Our 200 reviewed examples address many different challenges, propose a variety of solutions and support several different types of innovation, but this observation also applies to EIP-AGRI projects and non-EIP-AGRI partnerships separately. Increased productivity in the agricultural sector is imperative. (AKS), held in Paris, on 15-17 June 2011, discusses a large range of experiences and Inclusion in a multi-actor partnership does not necessarily guarantee involvement in the co-innovation process (Neef and Neubert 2011). In other words, this embeddedness fosters openness to innovation by mitigating the barriers listed above. from an environment perspective, or educational perspective). 2019). Central to the EIP-AGRI approach is the interactive innovation model, defined as: the collaboration between various actors to make best use of complementary types of knowledge (scientific, practical, organisational etc.) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. This is not so for other funding instruments, such as LIFE(+), ERASMUS+ and for the reviewed non-project activities. Since success is very difficult to quantify directly, interviewees were asked to evaluate the performance of their co-innovation activity according to four rather more tangible criteria on a 110 Likert scale where 1 was very low and 10 was very high. By contrast, the high incidence (57.1 per cent) of food safety/product quality among the non-project activities without funding hints that the participants may be expecting product development to yield an early return on investment. 2 0 obj Whether farmers used the new information depended on successful trial of the new pest management strategy, and on the credibility of the source. Growers' information seeking contexts were individual, personalised, situated within experiential practices, bounded by locales, and facilitated by social practices. just a small proportion of the 20 million farming businesses across the EU, will be directly involved in the EIP-AGRI through participation in OGs or related initiatives. Secondly, a one telephone call semi-structured interview was held with a key informant, involving questions related to the partnership, cooperation within it, its performance and outcomes, and a short self-evaluation. 2015; Fieldsend et al. <>36]/P 24 0 R/Pg 43 0 R/S/Link>> Business (B) (e.g. Even in the EIP-AGRI, there is a continuing dominance of academic partners in our reviewed (especially H2020) projects (Table 3 and Figure 6). Key: see Table 3; also X: other. The main source (yielding 523 candidates) was the EIP-AGRI project database. Since the research was to be conducted by 17 LIAISON partners from 15 countries, the methodology was designed to maximise consistency and replicability of the results. Appligent AppendPDF Pro 6.3 Systems for global challenges, The role of innovation brokers in the agricultural innovation system, The European Union system for health and consumer protection, The United States approach for fostering new biological technologies and ensuring