Research into Use: An Experiment in Innovation

This 4-page brief examines the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, which the United Kingdom (UK)'s Department for International Development (DFID) launched in 2006 in an attempt to reinvent how agricultural research is used for impact. RIU seeks to move the role of projects from managing the quality of research to managing the relationships needed for innovation and impact. RIU is a successor to DFID's 10-year Renewable Natural Resources Research Strategy (RNRRS).

As detailed here, RIU's rationale rests on the rapid and wide-scale promotion of high-impact-potential research products with an emphasis on strengthening long-term capacity for learning and change. RIU's first 5 experiments are detailed here. The fifth, a cross-cutting experiment, is communication-related. It concerns engagement with policy to ensure that lessons from RIU - on how to put research into use - start to influence framework conditions. This is being done in two ways. The first is a research and communication strategy that is using a website and related media to promote lessons. The second involves a range of ways that the Africa country programmes (Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) are engaging in policy dialogue - both formally and informally.

The following core features are identified here as being at the heart of RIU's guiding strategies within the initial series of experiments:

1. partnership: Sometimes this involves partnering to strengthen the communication of research products - for example, the fish seed and fingerlings project in Bangladesh is working with partners that can help promote approaches that allow the wider distribution of genetically improved fish.
2. private sector focus: In one cluster of projects in Asia, the approach has been to engage entrepreneurs and companies involved in linking farmers to input and output markets. "More generally the RIU experiments seem to be challenging common assumptions about public and private sector roles and this is a topic where RIU lessons will have much to offer."
3. the importance of innovation brokering by programmes, projects, companies, and others: "Sometimes this has been used to build local networks and alliances. Other times brokering has been used to negotiate changes in the wider techno-institutional system..."

RIU then brought in innovation studies expertise to form a central research team to help draw out lessons, which include:

• The challenge is about putting the research process into use as much as it is about putting research products into use.
• Innovation diversity is central to the research design, emphasising that there is no optimal approach or way of organising research into use for innovation and impact.
• The main investigative focus of the research is to understand the clustering of organisations, resources, and institutional and policy regimes around different market and development niches and how these can be used to enable innovation and impact.
• The main analytical focus is on understanding which approaches work best in which market and development niches.
• Research combines public policy with business investment reconnaissance perspectives to ensure that guidance on choices and new opportunities is articulated in ways attractive to the widest possible audiences.

Based on these lessons, and as a framework going forward to help sort evidence from its research, RIU proposes these 6 approaches to organising innovation and impact - those that:

1. place economically poor farmers and consumers at the centre of the innovation process - they are the ones with knowledge of their production and social context;
2. seek to deploy the expertise and resource and market perspectives of the private sector in an alliance with public actors and policies;
3. focus on institutional and network development with a view to enhancing innovation system capacity;
4. seek to nurture emerging innovation models that focus on the opportunities presented by large markets of economically poor people;
5. rely on financial incentives for innovation; and
6. seek to improve the transmission and availability of ideas to different audiences and make them accessible through databases that use communication as a network building tool.

"What is already apparent at this early stage is that no one approach...will fit in any one niche. Rather, we expect to see a bundling of these different approaches."