specific to the needs of each subsector. Market intelligence becomes an important public good in improving the efficiency of the market and directing investment in the subsector, including research investment. In countries such as Brazil, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics collects basic census and production data,4 while agricultural economic research institutes collect information on prices, domestic trade volumes, agroprocessing output, and international markets and undertake analytical work in support of market development. Learning alliances. Learning alliances provide a platform for networking often disparate R&D institutions around a common focal area involving program or project development and implementation. They focus especially on the learning associated with scaling up innovations, which usually involves the interaction of research, capacity building, project implementation, and evaluation. These platforms move beyond the scope of a traditional monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system and focus on broader learning objectives across institutions. Learning alliances are particularly intensive in the use of facilitation and information synthesis and require external funding to operate. See IAP 4.
Organizational change of research within an evolving AIS
Organizational change within a research system reflects increasing differentiation and specialization in the production of new knowledge, products, and services. This differentiation among R&D organizations is driven by improvements in their ability to respond to changing demands within the agricultural sector as organizational linkages within the sector improve (TNs 1 and 5; box 4.3). Closer interaction between publicly funded agricultural research and an expanding private sector and civil society has organizational implications for research because interaction shifts the locus of agricultural research, research priorities, and research financing. This shift is most apparent in the rapidly growing economies of Asia, which are experiencing increasingly dynamic organizational change. Private investment in agricultural research is expanding rapidly, especially in plant breeding. Hybrid maize led the movement of seed companies into breeding, but they have since expanded into horticulture, hybrid rice, and plantation crops. In Asia and Latin America, public plant breeding has responded to these developments by either moving toward more prebreeding
and genomics research in support of the private sector or toward breeding for areas not covered by the private sector (box 4.4). In sub-Saharan Africa the market and agricultural research context remains quite different, requiring NARIs to balance traditional research focusing on productivity with an emergent private sector that has almost no capacity to undertake research. Finding this balance, improving connectivity to the private sector to improve farmers’ access to markets, and developing more effective linkages to bridging organizations that provide services to farmers are all on the agenda of how the NARI improves its connectivity within the AIS. In many cases, approaches will vary depending on location and commodity, as research organizations have a role even in postconflict situations. In all cases, enhanced partnerships with a diversity of NGOs, farmer organizations, and civil society organizations are critical to effective performance. With their persistent funding constraints, African NARIs face an increasing dilemma in organizing themselves to respond to an expanding range of innovation processes, which are often grouped around relatively micro market and development niches. As Hall, Dijkman, and Sulaiman V. (2010: 4) have argued, “Innovation diversity is central to research design, emphasizing that there is no optimal approach or way of organizing research into use for innovation and impact; rather it is context-specific and path-dependent.� How African NARIs address the diversity question in their external linkages while organizing their limited internal resources around the biotic, natural resource, and impending climate change challenges facing African agriculture will be a persistent driver of organizational change within NARIs. Such change is best built on experimentation, piloting, and continuing enhancement of skills in developing external institutional arrangements, while evolving increased flexibility in designing research products and services.
Pro-poor innovation
The market orientation of AIS raises a number of challenges with respect to pro-poor innovation; in many ways these challenges echo the debate over the equity impacts of the Green Revolution. First, the rural poor are primarily found in contexts characterized by poorly developed markets, either because of inadequate transport infrastructure, distance to markets, or low population density. The poor often reside in marginal areas bypassed by private investment
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