AgriSpin has real-life pointers for actors who support innovation, such as advisors, innovation support service providers, public authorities, and researchers. In 25 recommendations, AgriSpin advises them on the important role they play in an innovation process.

The recommendations of AgriSpin are primarily based on experiences from the 13 Cross Visits during which multi-actor teams from the partners investigated 57 innovation cases. The “lessons learned” of AgriSpin looks at both personal and process-related issues.

The Personality of Advisors Matters

For an advisor to bring something valuable to the table in an innovation process with a farmer, his scope needs to be twofold. Apart, of course, from having relevant knowledge, technical insights etc., certain personal characteristics must go hand in hand with this knowledge.

Personal traits such as empathy, involvement, dynamism, critical and anticipative thinking, as well as the ability to work in teams are very helpful and necessary when supporting farmers in making decisions in an innovation process.

Some additional personal characteristics are also required in order for the advisor to be supportive. The advisor must have a strong capacity for connecting people. He must also be proactive towards other relevant actors, and finally, he must have the skills and tools to reflect on the process with the network involved in the innovation.

ISSPs Focus On the Process

Innovation Support Service Providers (ISSPs) are institutions as well as individual actors that provide advisory and/or technical service to the innovation process. They play several roles during an innovation process.

As the AgriSpin project has demonstrated, success emerges when a “free actor”, who is not industry driven but independent, is involved in the innovation process. An ISSP could, therefore, pay attention to involving and nurturing free actors and their ideas by supporting and challenging them.

Every innovation process consists of different stages and each stage requires specific personal characteristics, network, support, and people. Thus, the ISSP has a role to play in identifying the different stages and needs during the innovation process and to develop strategies and services that fit each stage.

The ISSP could also focus on bringing farmers with the same idea or need together with some external experts. A group can do more together and they have more competences than a single person. This approach will also lead to better implementation.

Finally, a farmer benefits from an ISSP that acts in a pro-active way. This implies that it is important for the ISSP to reach out and notice changes in society or detect problems that could involve farmers and to search for innovative solutions.

Public Authorities Enable the Environment

Public authorities must help create and maintain an ecosystem for innovation. This can be done by supporting the frameworks and conditions that build warm networks of actors and stakeholders who will foster innovation projects.

All too often, public authorities see an innovation project as a linear instead of an iterative process. Therefore, it would be good to evaluate the innovation process, instead of evaluating milestones and pure outcomes, to admit failures and communicate more about them, and to explore new ways of monitoring personal characteristic development and learning.

Public authorities also play an important role in communicating the range of funding possibilities at the different stages of an innovation process in order to foster synergies and plan innovation implementation more efficiently.

Science Must Get Closer To the Farmers

In order to get more useful scientific results, researchers need to get more involved in stakeholder activities and vice versa. Promoting new arrangements that include researchers in multi-actor networks and other actors in research activities could be one way of achieving this goal.

To ensure that researchers are closer to the farmers’ needs, universities and research organizations should allow researchers to develop their interpersonal and personal characteristics such as interaction, facilitation, communication etc.

Finally, when the researchers participate more, it will help them prioritize their research topics. This ensures that the scope of a research project links to the needs of farmers and that it will be used by them.

Read More

Read about the “Lessons learned” in the inspirational booklet.

Or take a look at all 25 recommendations and compare them with the report on the AgriSpin innovation cases.