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Colleagues, I'm glad that the science and technology portion of this exchange is heating up! I would like to applaud Dana Dalrymple's latest posting, and would add the following: Ultimately, all successful innovation must fill users' needs, or else it will not be adopted. But this does NOT mean that the users can or should be "leading" the innovation, or even that users must participate directly in the innovation process. Of course end-users must participate in the final stages of refinement of any innovation, but to the extent that the whole innovation process is made demand-led and participatory, it will be pursuing approaches that are already known and available to the users: in other words, it won't be as innovative as it might be. One can think of a continuum, from what users know and can do to what specialized researchers know and can do. It seems clear to me that poor farmers know more than anyone else can possibly know about their own circumstances: what they can't do is how to make large changes in the available technology, through new crop genetics, new mechanical devices, etc. As I see it, the key question is whether specialist innovators have a real incentive to meet users' needs. If they do, they will use their specialized knowledge and skills to do something genuinely new, something that the users can use but couldn't make for themselves. Dana Dalrymple's "supply-led" innovators have been successful where users' needs are relatively easy for outsiders to see. To make a gross generalization, I think this was more the case for the large and relatively homogeneous cultivation systems that benefited from the past green revolutions, than it is for the patchy, agro-pastoral systems of Africa and parts of South Asia, the Andes, etc. that have not yet experienced a green revolution, and where it is not at all obvious to anyone what technologies are likely to work best. So, how to reward innovators to produce what users need, but can't make for themselves? One proposal is to introduce some "pull" mechanisms for the funding of research, to complement the "push" mechanisms by which donors fund projects and programs. The terminology is due to Michael Kremer, who considers pull mechanisms to be all payments that are tied to adoption and impact: most notably that would be royalties from patents, but it would also include "prize" payments paid for public domain technologies. The trick in designing a pull mechanism is how to compute the value of payments, and make a low-transaction cost mechanism for donors to reward innovators. A particular proposal for how to do this is detailed in a recent journal article, available on-line at: http://www.agbioforum.org/v6n12/v6n12a14-masters.htm I won't go into details here -- there are also longer write-ups of the proposal available on my own website, at: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/cgsd/masters-news I know that DfID has been interested in the pull mechanisms in the past -- indeed their work with Michael Kremer stimulated the work that is referenced above. I would be very keen to hear what the community is now thinking about this kind of payment device, and its potential to help answer the question of how to make R&D more demand-led, without losing its innovative character. Will Masters ------------------------------------------ William A. Masters Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development, The Earth Institute at Columbia University http://www.earth.columbia.edu/cgsd/masters Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University Professor of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University ------------------------------------------
Please visit dfid-agriculture-consultation.nri.org.