Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

For most poor countries of today, using agriculture for development is widely recognized as a promising strategy. Yet, in these countries, investment in agriculture has mostly been lagging relative to international norms and recommendations. Current wisdom on how to use agriculture for development is that it requires asset building for smallholder farmers, productivity growth in staple foods, an agricultural transformation (diversification of farming systems toward high value crops), and a rural transformation (value addition through rural non-farm activities linked to agriculture). This sequence has too often been hampered by extensive market and government failures. We outline a theory of change where the removal of market and government failures to use this Agriculture for Development strategy can be addressed through two contrasted and complementary approaches. One is from the “supply-side” where public and social agents (governments, international and bilateral development agencies, NGOs, donors) intervene to help farmers overcome the major constraints to adoption: liquidity, risk, information, and access to markets. The other is from the “demand-side” where private agents (entrepreneurs, producer organizations) create incentives for smallholder farmers to modernize through contracting and vertical coordination in value chains. We review the extensive literature that has explored ways of using Agriculture for Development through these two approaches. We conclude by noting that the supply-side approach has benefited from extensive research but met with limited success. The demand-side approach has promise, but received insufficient attention and is in need of additional rigorous research which we outline

GTTC Future of Ground Testing Meta-Analysis of 20 Documents

National research, development, test, and evaluation ground testing capabilities in the United States are at risk. There is a lack of vision and consensus on what is and will be needed, contributing to a significant threat that ground test capabilities may not be able to meet the national security and industrial needs of the future. To support future decisions, the AIAA Ground Testing Technical Committees (GTTC) Future of Ground Test (FoGT) Working Group selected and reviewed 20 seminal documents related to the application and direction of ground testing. Each document was reviewed, with the content main points collected and organized into sections in the form of a gap analysis current state, future state, major challenges/gaps, and recommendations. This paper includes key findings and selected commentary by an editing team

Performance-Based Specifications: Exploring When They Work and Why

There is extensive research and attention on innovation and sustainable public procurement (SPP) in the European Union at present, with the 2014 revision of the Procurement Directives, the Innovation Union strategy and other European Union policy initiatives. This report seeks to contribute to this discussion through the investigation of the use of performance based specifications (PBSs) in public procurement in the European Union and the United States. The report outlines the benefits and limitations of the use of PBSs, even in the most "progressive" public procurement environments, such as the Netherlands, particularly around their ability to support sustainable development goals and deliver environmental benefits for a procuring authority, such as energy and resource efficiency. Additionally, this report aims to identify the sectors in which the enabling conditions for the successful use of PBSs in public procurement are in place and to understand what policies and regulations are needed to promote the use of PBSs in public tenders and public procurement framework agreements

Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development’, paper presented at the 4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ECEI), Antwerp, Belgium, 10-12 September, 2009.Increasingly the issues of entrepreneurship and new venture creation have become two of the most important drivers for future success of the UK economy, especially in the current climate of economic turbulence and uncertainty. The creation of an enterprise culture, one that depends on entrepreneurs, is one of the strategic goals of the UK Government’s action plan for micro- and small-enterprises. The development of these enterprise cultures will naturally create a marketplace ‘churn’, one that stimulates both continuous and radical innovations, and as a consequence of this contribute to the overall UK’s overall productivity and sustained economic performance. Yet research on entrepreneurs, and particularly third-age entrepreneurs, their abilities and motivation to start-up new enterprises within the environmental good and services sector is limited.Our research study utilizes qualitative data collection and analysis. We have engaged with 12 small enterprise entrepreneurs who are currently, or have already started-up a new enterprise in the EGS sector. Our research studies on how opportunities and threats influence third-age enterpreneurs’ values, attitudes and practices suggested that both, sector-wide values and practices, as well as the strength of sector-based systems of innovations, significantly influence the effective prediction of venture creation, development and creative destruction practices. It is these third- age entrepreneurs mindset Business Models (BMs), how they perceive they can generate business value and align their business practices around EGS sector opportunities and threats, that both determines their propensity to create new ventures, and their motivation and success in driving new venture creation and development oportunities. A framework is proposed based on our limited entrepreneurial mindset analysis that links their values, vision and actions with a more substantial evaluation of their overall mindset business model.Peer reviewe

Innovation dynamics and the role of infrastructure

This report shows how the role of the infrastructure – standards, measurement, accreditation, design and intellectual property – can be integrated into a quantitative model of the innovation system and used to help explain levels and changes in labour productivity and growth in turnover and employment. The summary focuses on the new results from the project, set out in more detail in Sections 5 and 6. The first two sections of the report provide contextual material on the UK innovation system, the nature and content of the infrastructure knowledge and the institutions that provide it. Mixed modes of innovation, the typology of innovation practices developed and applied here, is constituted of six mixed modes, derived from many variables taken from the UK Innovation Survey. These are: Investing in intangibles Technology with IP innovating Using codified knowledge Wider (managerial) innovating Market-led innovating External process modernising. The composition of the innovation modes, and the approach used to compute them, is set out in more detail in Section 4. Modes can be thought of as the underlying process of innovation, a bundle of activities undertaken jointly by firms, and whose working out generates well known indicators such as new product innovations, R&D spending and accessing external information, that are the partial indicators gathered from the innovation survey itself

The Craft of Incentive Prize Design: Lessons from the Public Sector

In the last five years, incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation tool to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private and philanthropic sectors. This report offers practical lessons for public sector leaders and their counterparts in the philanthropic and private sectors to help understand what types of outcomes incentive prizes help to achieve, what design elements prize designers use to create these challenges and how to make smart design choices to achieve a particular outcome. It synthesizes insights from expert interviews and analysis of more than 400 prize

How organic agriculture contributes to sustainable development

Organic agriculture can contribute to meaningful socio-economic and ecologically sustainable development, especially in poorer countries. This is due on the one hand to the application of organic principles, which means efficient management of local resources (e.g. local seed varieties, manure, etc.) and therefore costeffectiveness. On the other hand, the market for organic products – at local and international level – has tremendous growth prospects and offers creative producers and exporters in the South excellent opportunities to improve their income and living conditions. Establishing whether organic agriculture is a viable alternative for a particular holding needs to be carried out on a case-by-case basis. What potential does organic agriculture have for solving the problems of hunger and poverty? What can organic agriculture contribute to achieving socially and ecologically sustainable development in poor countries? Central to organic agriculture are promotion of soil fertility, biodiversity conservation (e.g. native flora and fauna), production methods adapted to the locality and avoidance of chemical inputs. These methods, together with cultivation of a diverse range of crops, stabilize the delicate ecosystems in the tropics and reduce drought sensitivity and pest infestation. Organic agriculture reduces the risk of yield failure, stabilizes returns and improves the quality of life of small farmers’ families. To date, no systematic attempt has been made to evaluate the benefits and effects of each system. In 2006, FiBL therefore launched a network of long-term system comparisons in the tropics that aims at examining the contribution of organic agriculture to food security, poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. The article presents this discussion based on experience gained in practice and encompasses the following hypotheses: 1. Organic agriculture is sustainable and diverse; 2. Organic farmers conserve resources; 3. Organic farmers produce more, better-quality products and achieve higher incomes; 4. Organic products provide market access and create added value; 5. Organic agriculture increases self-confidence and mobilizes new partnerships

Hercules finances research infrastructure

In 2007 the Flemish government created a structural funding channel to support investment in research infrastructure: Hercules. On 15 October 2008 the Hercules Foundation approved a first list of investment proposals. In this article specific features of this first call are examined