Impact of research on development in Cameroon: convergence between supply and research needs in the food sector

The study analyse the convergence of research priorities to development issues especially from the agricultural and food sector in terms of environmental protection and improvement of the business climate, due to weak institution al interconnection devices. Two types of data are used: bibliometric data and a survey of enterprises. Altogether, 1214 and 1708 bibliographic references were generated from WoS and Scopus respectively (from a total of 9146 and 10 557 publications) in Agriculture, Food and Environment for the period 1991-2015 subject to the condition that the author or at least one of the authors is affiliated to an institution based in Cameroon. A total of 317 agro-food companies were identified from the National Institute enterprise's census. The overall message is a relative weak convergence between development priorities identified from perceptions over agricultural and food companies and research works expressed in the scientific literature. This reflects the weak link between research institutions (universities, research canter's) and professional milieus that shape entrepreneurship (firms, policy makers) for guidance of scientific production

Renewing agricultural approaches

Even though studies on innovation in agriculture are relatively new, they form part of a longer history of approaches to technical progress and transformations of the agricultural sector. This chapter explores the history of the uses of the notion of innovation in agriculture and reviews the studies in this field, focusing in particular on the contributions of economics and sociology. This history can be divided into three distinct periods: until the Second World War, the notion of innovation did not appear in the literature, even though the subject of technical progress, not included by economists in their analyses, was very present in the agricultural sciences; over the next 40 years, diffusionist approaches to innovation were applied to all sectors, including agriculture, whose modernization was supported by sociologists and economists; finally, starting in the 1980s, criticism started growing of this previous agricultural development model and was accompanied by a new way of thinking about innovation, opening up new perspectives for research on innovation in agriculture and related domains