Hugo Campos - A Roadmap to Value Creation

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Innovation is the source of progress. Without it, livelihoods contract and prosperity declines. In medicine, innovation leads to disease prevention and cures. In the farming and food sectors, innovation increases production, improves post-harvest handling, as well as reduces the environmental footprint to deliver greater value to consumers.

Innovation in these sectors is needed more than ever. More than 800 million people are chronically undernourished worldwide, while two billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. Water, land and forests are under increasing pressure with changing weather and climate patterns negatively impacting agriculture. Many of the worlds poor live in rural areas and depend on farming and natural resources for employment and livelihoods. Innovation is needed, but what constitutes innovation in this field? How does it arise, and what can be done to achieve more of it? What motivates users to adopt or reject innovation, and how can it be brought to bear on specific challenges, especially at scale? These questions are the subject of this timely book: The Innovation revolution in agriculture A roadmap to value creation by Dr. Hugo Campos and his coauthors.

This book defines innovation as significant, positive change that innovators work for and hope to achieve. Examples include increases in crop yields due to better management and improved seeds. Productivity growth underpins food and nutrition security, poverty reduction, and the conservation of natural resources. It arises when farmers adopt improved technologies and practices developed by R&D efforts, often paid for by governments or private investors. Adoption is the prize. There is no market for innovations without user adoption nor any scope for impact or investor reward. Understanding adoption is therefore key.

Among the factors that drive adoption, two stand out: relevance and availability.

First, innovations must be relevant from the users point of view, offering real improvements compared with what they already have and reducing satisfaction gaps they deal with in their daily lives. Second, innovations must be available in the market, allowing supply to fulfill demand, so that value creation can take place. Adoption-friendly business conditions are important too but may be beyond developers immediate control. Policy bias against agriculture, disrespect for property rights, and inadequate farmer access to information, finance, insurance, and markets can also inhibit adoption.

Ultimately, users adopt innovations that make life easier for them, raise the profitability of what they do without adding too much risk, and help them realize their dreams and aspirations. Market research to understand how a proposed innovation helps users get the job done can lead to relevance-enhancing insight and design. Thus, market-led approaches to agricultural innovation are superior to purely science-based work from an adoptability point of view.

Science is a means to an end that can be assembled in a variety of ways, but the focus should be on what users want. The private sector knows this. The public sector appears often not to be aware of it. The need to innovate is not trivial and the list of failed innovation attempts in different sectors and industries is long. The common factor in publicly and privately driven innovation successes over the past 50 years in agriculture involved products and solutions considered relevant by users and disseminated systematically through national programs and input markets.

Therefore, the authors persuasively contend that innovation requires business models that create and deliver value. Interacting with the market and clarifying user needs is the place to start, followed by identifying potential technologies and R&D strategies to address them not the other way around. Ecosystems of skills, methods, partnerships, and resources need to be assembled to drive the task, assess progress from time to time, learn from failure, change course if required, test prototypes, and finally bring products to market. Claims of success should be held back until proof of sustained adoption is demonstrated.

Business models are also needed to improve the enabling environment for uptake of innovations by farmers and across agrifood value chains. The transaction costs of accessing markets, information, and farm services are often high from farmers perspectives and need to be reduced. This book discusses partnership-based ventures where public and private actors work together to achieve better value. It explores the role of digital technologies and big data in agricultural innovation and assesses market-making efforts to help farmers respond to new opportunities such as nutritious, high-value, profitable crops.

Agricultural and food markets are undergoing rapid change for two main reasons: (1) rising consumer demand for quality and convenience and (2) changing economies of scale and scope in procurement, processing, wholesale, and retail. This changes the technology frontier, calls for appropriate decision support systems for farmers and others in value chains, and opens prospects for new input and output traits for crops. Agricultural and food innovation systems are invited to respond.