 overview of innovation platforms and I recall from this morning's opening question of who's in the room about 90% of the room has had some exposure to innovation platforms. Yeah some just heard of it and others have a fairly good grasp of it. So we had a definition of innovation in the morning there's another one on the screen in front of you as the process of technical social and institutional change that results from the interaction amongst multi-layered sources of knowledge and its transformation into new things, projects or practices applied in a specific institutional and cultural context. Very broad definition. The ingredients of innovations if you like are dialogue and shared learning, incentive and resources to develop businesses, reflection so that we can have double-loop learnings and acting at various levels. It was mentioned in this morning's presentation by Bernie that Singapore has you know wonderful science park and innovation networks and so on but no agriculture. Yeah this is not a phenomenon that's unique to agriculture and in fact in industry and commerce we find that quite a lot. Businesses get together, create science parks and business hubs in order to bring similar industries together and spur their innovations. So a lot of that revolves around putting universities, R&D institutes, companies near markets and letting them develop incubate ideas, startups, startups and also easy access to enabling environment. So access to capital and good legal protection in terms of patents and so on and so forth. When you put that together you start seeing a lot of growth. In the agricultural innovation system a lot is borrowed from that. So organizations and individuals will come together to generate, diffuse and adopt new knowledge. So basically working together, pulling together, delivering together. That's one of the mantras of this approach. The innovation platform can be physical or it can be virtual. It's essentially a form that's established to facilitate the interactions and learning amongst the various stakeholders and it can be from a commodity chain analysis or it can be from a natural resource management but there would be a topic that brings people together. People will not and frankly should not come together just for the sake of it unless they have a purpose. That would not be very sustainable. We have to work to maintain interest. So since 90% of you have some exposure to the topic I'd like you in small groups and actually by small groups I mean groups of two. So turn around to your neighbor and talk for, it says five but we'll make it two, talk for two minutes about who uses innovation platforms, how do they work and what process you typically find and what are the main benefits and constraints. You don't have to cover all four but talk about one of these four or one or two of these four for two minutes with someone next to you. So a quick question on who uses innovation platforms. Who would like to come in on that? Microphone please. All stakeholders. Okay, which means what? The actors, the partners in the whole system. Okay, can you give some examples? Researchers, farmers, policy makers, private sector, market. Absolutely. Thank you. What about, what do they do? How do they work? Integrating the knowledge, I mean integrating the advances knowledge. That means innovation platforms. Okay, thank you very much. Somebody else add to that in terms of how they work. Would somebody else like to offer us more insights? They have to work in, they have to work in convergence, partnership, collaboration, cooperation and so on. Yes. Can somebody tell me what is the typical constraints? What are some of the typical constraints of innovation platforms? Probably sometimes it's very difficult to arrive in a certain conclusion in a given period of time. Yes, for instance, what is another constraint that can be linked to that? Please use the microphone. Probably conflict of interest. Yes, we can have conflicts of interest in these groups. Can also be very expensive and the group thing. Okay. So you have a problem, whatever that problem might be, you come together, so you start. The first thing that you do is you initiate the platform. If you don't have one, then you together with the platform decide on the focus. Even though I already had a problem here, we're still going to discuss it and agree together on the focus. We then are going to identify what the options that are available to us to tackle that. We're going to then test and we find solutions. Once we have our solutions, we might need to develop capacities in order to be able to implement those solutions and take them up to scale. As we're doing that, we're going to analyze and learn from our experience and the cycle will go on. Yeah. So this is a typical model of an innovation platform cycle. You can look at that also in terms of a breakdown of themes and issues to reflect upon. So you have one example here in terms of composition, coordination, power, resource and monitoring, and specific sub issues that you need to consider. I'm not going to go into all of those now, but you'll have them in your materials. When you're considering from a policy perspective from an extension to have one, you can use that as a checklist to think, have we given these matter of thoughts? Yeah. And I'm also going to provide you with a number of alternative authors who have looked at this and come came up with different phases. So some have six, some have seven, some have five, but they're all extremely similar in in their process. It does not matter which one you subscribe to. It does matter that you actually have one that you are following and checking that you have a good checklist that you're not forgetting critical steps along the way, especially if this is a relatively new concept for the organization that is promoting or facilitating the platform. It's a dynamic process. So the focus can change. The membership can change the responsibilities can change. Just because you met this morning to discuss what to do with the forest between Addis and Ababa does not mean that that same group will always and only work on that forest issue. Yeah. So it's important to keep that in mind in terms of the process that we follow. Some of the main benefits is that it facilitates dialogues and understanding and upward communication. It can help reach better informed decisions. It can also help make innovative research possible. Which one of these would you consider to be the most enticing benefit? So think now really for from your own perspective, your organization, if you go back and you pitch your boss, I want us to experiment with an innovation platform approach. What is the reason that you find most enticing? There's no right or wrong here. Okay, interesting. So the room is fairly split and all of these are good reasons, but the top reason from this group, we have a tie in first place between facilitating dialogue and enabling innovative research. Yeah. Is that because is that because you feel that in your systems, you're not seeing enough of those? This is a question that I have when I see these results always thinking, why is it the most important? But we're not here to only look at the good and the beautiful. We also need to consider the constraints. It's always important because in the real world, we look at the tradeoffs. So some of the constraints include that you really need full buy-in from all the members. And that can be very difficult and costly to implement. And we need tangible outputs to sustain the members' interest and commitment. This is especially true when you want to involve farmers in the private sector. So I mean, a farmer will not continue to come to a meeting to sit and discuss for the sake of it, unless he or she sees a tangible benefit. Yeah. It's usually researchers and government officials who are more, you know, happy to come and sit and talk. But that's usually because either they're doing research on that. So it's part of their work or they're representing and that's also part of their work. But for other groups, you really have to make sure that they're getting value for money. This is important because if you don't get that, people drop out. And what that means is that topics that don't give an immediate benefit, for example, natural resource management issues might have a harder time sustaining innovation platforms, unless you link it directly to an economic benefit, which means that you'll need to be more aware of how you address these issues. It can also be difficult to monitor and evaluate in a systematic way. It's about people coming together, sitting together talking, right? How do you evaluate where something really happened? Maybe today there was a breakthrough, but it looks like just every other meeting people sat around the table and talked. So again, my question to you from the reasons which are from the constraints which are on the screen, which one do you find the biggest most crippling effect or limitation of an innovation platform? Okay, here we have a clear decision, which is difficult and costly to implement. Learning alliances piloted by the Central International for Agricultural Tropical or the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture based in Cali in Colombia in Latin America, designed in the early 2000s a solution for challenges of outscaling. It quickly evolved into vehicles for strategic learning and capacity development. And they're an approach for building multi stakeholder innovation systems. So essentially something very similar in its origins and objectives to an innovation platform. If you look at the definition that's on the screen involving research donors, development policy makers, bringing together to share good practice, it sounds very similar to the definitions of innovation platforms that we have been discussing. So essentially, they are different names for very, very similar processes. Again, at the IP or learning alliance works at various levels. So you can work on it at the local level, at the meso regional level or the macro level. So when we talked about innovation platforms originating in industry and business, but which part of the concept that we see in business did not necessarily translate well into agriculture? Is it that A, the aim of improving the livelihoods of all stakeholders? B, the involvement of diverse sectors? C, sharing of knowledge and technology? Or D, the emphasis on high tech? Overwhelmingly correct. So an innovation platform in agriculture does not have to be about high tech. And in fact, most of the time it's not about high tech. Which of the following positive outcomes would you not anticipate from an innovation platform or learning alliance? A, increased number of patents? B, greater relevance to farmers needs? C, mobility of knowledge tools and approaches? Or D, enhanced learning? Only 18. Okay. Yes. You would typically not expect to find patents emerging out of an innovation platform. Is there much difference between, so is there is, the statement says there is negligible difference between an innovation platform and a learning alliance? Would you find this statement true or false? Interesting. You want to do it again? Yes, it's a true statement. Yeah? We just went over there, their main characteristics and we saw a large amount of similarities in the approach, bringing over the multiple actors working together to find solution to spur innovation. So it's very, very similar systems. Okay. Any open ended questions about module three, the innovation platforms?