Why is thinking about innovation non-innovative?

Why do some innovations flourish while others shrivel and disappear? What are the social dynamics that support the adoption of innovations? What determines people’s willingness and ability to adopt new technologies? Is it scientists and policy-makers who promote new technology? Or is rural innovation fostered by ordinary farmers who ‘unpack’ and ‘repack’ technologies as they adopt them?

A report raises both practical and philosophical questions about the nature of innovation. Challenging conventional development wisdom, it argues that innovation emerges as different agents learn and select improvements, in a process the author calls learning selection. Examples from agriculture, industry, economy and IT show that it is not experts who generate knowledge and technology but self-organising networks.

Successful innovation, the report argues, is based on diversity, grasping opportunities and mobilising creativity among people willing to run with a brilliant idea even if it is still flawed and underdeveloped. Evidence given from such diverse areas as rice harvesting, wind turbines, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and the LINUX open source computer operating system show that this way of looking at the world of innovation applies beyond the immediate field of agricultural engineering.

Case studies, many based on personal accounts of the (mis)introduction of agricultural technology, include evidence that:

• In top-down, donor-funded ventures, it may be in everyone’s interest – donors, ministry officials, field staff and even end users – to keep the ‘technology transfer’ process going, even when it is clear that the technology in question is inappropriate or not usable.
• The green revolution in rice in Indonesia, with its emphasis on a single crop and recommended levels of fertiliser and pesticides, required a new wave of innovation based on the principle that farmers are creative experts in managing their own fields.
• The high value placed on co-operation in Danish culture allowed wind turbine manufacturers to win out against US rivals held back by individualism, fondness for patents and fear of talking to competitors.
• The spread of LETS in the UK shows how user learning selection leads to local ownership of the idea, thus promoting attempts to improve the policy environment for the technology.
• The growth of Linux shows the capacity of the Internet to accelerate learning selection repetition through the rapid exchange of information among people separated by great distances.

Launching a learning selection innovation process requires:

• shedding any top-down, ‘big is good’, ‘private sector is best’ assumptions
• motivating people to co-develop a technology not by financial inducements or subsidies but with a prototype technology that makes a plausible promise of being of benefit to them
• following the KISS (‘keep it simple, stupid’) principle: prototypes should not be used to dazzle people with the ingenuity of their design but be simple and flexible enough to allow revision
• identifying a product champion – who is ‘low on the ego end’, prepared to admit mistakes and acknowledge the work of others – to identify and put into effect co-developers’ beneficial novelties
• not releasing innovations too widely too soon and only using patents when it is necessary to stop someone else trying to privatise a technology.

 

Source(s):
‘Enabling innovation: a practical guide to understanding and fostering technological change’, Zed Books, by Boru Douthwaite, 2002 Full document.
For overview Full document.

Funded by: International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Los Banos, Philippines and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, Nigeria

id21 Research Highlight: 16 April 2003

Further Information:
Boru Douthwaite
Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT)
A.A. 6713 Cali
Colombia

Tel: + 57 2 4450000 (direct) or +1 650 8336625 (via USA)
Fax: + 77 2 4450073 or +1 650 8336626
Contact the contributor: boru@douthwaite.net

Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT)

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