Innovation for Inclusive Development Program Prospectus for 2011-2016

Innovation for Inclusive Development

Program Prospectus for 2011-2016

Public Version

Program and Partnership Branch International Development Research Centre

October 2011

Innovation for Inclusive Development Program Prospectus for 2011-2016

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Table of Contents

LIST OF ACRONYMS ............................................................................................................................................... II

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .......................................................................................................................................... III 1. CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND....................................................................................................................... 1

A. DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE AND SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS ............................................................................................. 1 B. ABOUT THE PROGRAM ........................................................................................................................................... 6

2. APPROACH TO PROGRAMMING ................................................................................................................... 8

A. PROGRAM GOAL .................................................................................................................................................. 8 B. PROGRAM OUTCOMES .......................................................................................................................................... 8

3. PROGRAM STRATEGY ................................................................................................................................. 11 4. REGIONAL AND THEMATIC PRIORITIES ....................................................................................................... 13 5. CONCLUDING COMMENTS .......................................................................................................................... 16 6. REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................... 17


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List of Acronyms AFS Agriculture and Food Security

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GLOBELICS The Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence

Building Systems

GRIID Group for Research on Innovation for Inclusive Development

iBoP Innovation for the Base of the Pyramid

ICT4D Information & Communication Technologies for Development

IDRC International Development Research Centre

IID Innovation for Inclusive Development

ILO International Labour Organization

ITS Innovation, Technology and Society Program (2006-2011)

LAC Latin America and the Caribbean

MDGs Millennium Development Goals

MENA Middle East and North Africa

MSMEs Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

R&D Research and Development

RoKS Research on Knowledge Systems

S&T Science and Technology

STI Science Technology and Innovation

UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

UNDP United Nations Development Program

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization


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Executive Summary Over the past two decades, economic growth in many developing countries’ has been spurred by substantial investment in science, technology and innovation (STI). This investment has enabled these countries to graduate to middle income status by increasing their competitiveness, growth, and wealth. Yet, it has also resulted in greater internal inequality and multi-dimensional poverty— a billion of the world’s poorest people now live in middle income countries. While STI can contribute to poverty alleviation and wealth creation, innovations that emerge in the formal sector rarely address the needs of the poor. At the same time, a significant number of innovative activities take place in the growing informal sectors in developing countries. But growth-oriented approaches to STI fail to encourage or support these activities and so the impact tends to be marginal. Systemically studying innovation in informal settings is crucial to understanding how to transform marginal innovative activities into sustainable innovations that have wider impacts and stronger links with the formal sector. The field of innovation studies has proven useful to better understand how OECD countries and emerging ones such as South Korea and China have achieved competitiveness and growth. It illustrates that innovation depends upon dynamic interactions among actors such as firms, government agencies, universities, and science granting councils, that result in systemic learning and capacity building. This makes the understanding of knowledge flows for innovation important and raises questions of system failures in developing economies where not all of the relevant actors are well developed and connected. Likewise, the characteristics of informal actors, the interactions, and the learning processes that take place among them, can differ dramatically from those in the formal sector. This program will also contribute to the emerging field of Innovation for Inclusive Development by supporting research that merges the fields of innovation studies and development studies. It will support the development of new frameworks, methodologies and metrics for studying informal sector innovations. IID’s goal is to enable greater understanding of how innovation in the informal sector can improve livelihoods and contribute to inclusive development. It will place particular focus on the role of women and intermediaries that bridge informal and formal sectors, in activities essential to livelihoods, such as natural resources, services, and cultural industries. IID’s intended outcomes include low- and middle-income country universities conducting research on innovation for inclusive development, science granting councils funding research in this area, and governments developing enabling policies that encourage and support innovation for inclusive development.


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1. Context and Background

a. Development Challenge and Situational Analysis Over the past two decades, economic growth in a number of developing countries has been spurred by substantial investment in science, technology and innovation (STI) (UNESCO, 2010), enabling several developing countries to graduate to middle income status. Despite this progress, inequalities and multi-dimensional poverty1 have worsened—a billion of the world’s poorest people now live in middle income countries (Summers, 2010) (Figure 1). STI can genuinely alleviate poverty. Cellphones have had a notable impact in banking, agriculture, and health. Social innovations such as micro-credit have also reduced poverty. But striking examples that have had a widespread impact are few. The benefits of innovations emerging in the formal sector rarely address the needs of the poor because most STI policies are aimed at achieving economic growth and competitiveness and not at reducing poverty (Cassiolato, et al., 2008; Kaplinsky, 2010; STEP Centre, 2010). At the same time, an enormous amount of innovative activity takes place in the informal sector in developing countries, such as innovative waste management approaches, construction methods, vehicle maintenance, cellphone repairs and distribution, or ways of producing energy. But growth-oriented approaches to STI fail to

1 The number of people living in multi-dimensional poverty – an acute deprivation of basic human needs in health,

education, and standard of living – is estimated to be 1.75 billion, exceeding the number of people whose poverty is estimated by the $1.25 income a day measurement. (UNDP, 2010)

Figure 1 Population living in middle income countries on less than US$1.25 a day (in millions)

Source: The Guardian www.guardian.com.uk/global-development, found at “The New Bottom Billion and the MDGs—A Plan of Action”, IDS in Focus policy briefing, October 2010.

http://www.guardian.com.uk/global-development


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Box 1 - Informal services sector

"Suame Magazine" is Ghana's largest

informal industrial area and among the

largest in Africa. About 12,000 mostly

informal vehicle repairs and metal works

MSMEs conduct business there. Several

innovation activities making use of

available materials and creating products

to suit local needs, are hindered by poor

infrastructure; lack of computer-based

business solutions or modern machine

shop practices; and inconsistent energy

supply. A major challenge is meeting the

quality expectations of customers in the

formal sector; gaining access to markets

and capital and financial services; facing

health and safety risks; and lack of secure

land tenure. Further research is needed to

understand how support innovations in this

informal industrial area better link it to the

formal sector, to enable a local,

sustainable, Ghanaian vehicle repair

industry.

measure, encourage, or support these activities and so the impact of most tends to be marginal. The field of innovation studies has proven useful in emerging and developed countries. There is a correlation between a country’s overall economic performance and the functioning of its national innovation system. Innovation studies have been used, for example, to better understand how countries such as Korea and China have achieved competitiveness and economic growth by strengthening systemic linkages and interactions among multiple actors. The innovation systems framework is important because it illustrates that innovation is not a linear process whereby research and development (R&D) leads to commercialization, industrialization, and growth. Instead, it illustrates that what is most important are the dynamic linkages and interactions that take place among actors such as firms, government departments, universities, and science granting councils, that result in systemic learning, the distribution of knowledge throughout the system and lead to strengthening of capabilities (Lundvall et al., 2009). A finding common to both developed and developing countries, but more prevalent in the latter, is that there are more firms that innovate than do R&D. Taking a systemic approach to studying innovation, notably in informal settings, is crucial to understanding how to transform marginal innovative activities into innovations that are sustainable and have wider impact to include those people that are usually left out from the benefits of formal sector innovations. Understanding of knowledge flows for innovation is pertinent; it raises questions of system failures in developing economies where not all of the actors are well connected. Learning capabilities are weakened by constrained opportunities to apply local knowledge to the solution of local development problems (Box 1). Evidence from earlier IDRC’s Innovation, Technology and Society (ITS) projects (2006-2011) demonstrate that formal STI policies insufficiently address the informal sector, or worse, completely ignore it. For example, in China, industrial decentralization to diversify rural incomes failed to impact local economies in the mountainous coastal areas of China because of weak innovation system linkages. In fact, the research showed that the formal innovation processes not only did not help the poor in this region, but led to greater exclusion. Another study of three rural Indian clusters found that a lack of intermediaries resulted in informal rural enterprises in textiles, footwear, and terracotta pottery


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unable to leverage government support for technology development, business infrastructure, and access to credit or markets. The missing links between public policies and the informal sector underscore the important intermediating roles that local and developmental agencies can play. These include helping small informal enterprises access scientific and technical knowledge and technology, find specialised markets, and overcome policy bottlenecks. While there are many challenges to bridging the informal and formal sectors, examples of innovative activities in the informal sector that are linked to the formal sector do exist. For example, an ICT4D project in West Africa showed that dynamic and highly adaptive practices occur in the informal sector in the area of telecommunication service delivery for urban and peri-urban households. The liberalization of the telecommunication sector in three countries enabled actors to ingeniously develop tools to repair and adapt any mobile phone as well as regularly innovate in delivering services on the basis of cultural customs and revenues from clients. Most of the services developed by telecom operators to address low income populations’ needs were influenced by informal actors’ innovations, which has resulted in new jobs and sources of income for youth in these countries. An IID project is now using this past ICT4D project as a case study for the development of indicators for innovation in Africa. In improving our understanding of the dynamics of learning and innovation processes, one has to acknowledge that there are still some knowledge gaps on what comprises innovation in the informal economy. Even beyond the informal sector, “innovation” has many meanings. A broad definition is converting knowledge to value. In business terms, “value” means “commercial” value. In other words, a true innovation is something novel, to the firm, to the sector, or to the world, such as a product, a process, or a way of organizing, that connects to the market.2 In a development context however, innovation is expected to contribute to improving people’s lives. Thus, while improving financial assets is one important dimension, other objectives include multi-dimensional poverty alleviation, such as empowering marginalized groups. Moreover, social innovations, or adaptations are as important as technical ones. In fact, while social innovations, such as participatory budgeting processes, may thrive with little technical input, the reverse is not true. Technical innovations such as improved water pumps depend on social adaptation to genuinely improve people’s lives. Given the myriad of definitions of innovation, one of the program’s goals will be to assist in developing a common understanding of the processes and outcomes that can be described as innovation in the informal sector. IID will thus, at its outset, adopt a broad definition of innovation that can be refined: processes that improve people’s lives by transforming knowledge into new or improved ways of doing things in a place where or (by people for whom) they have not been used before.

2 www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/61/2367580.pdf

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/61/2367580.pdf


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Re-conceptualizing innovation studies to investigate how to add value to innovative activities taking place in the informal sector is critical because the livelihoods of so many low income people in developing countries depend on informal economic activities. For example, the estimated contribution of the informal sector to GDP is 29% in Latin America, between 27% - 41% in Africa, and 41% in Asia (Floodman Becker, 2004). Transforming marginal innovative activities into sustainable innovations with wider impact by strengthening links between the informal and the formal sector could greatly improve productivity and improve people’s lives. Informality and livelihoods: From its earliest observations, the informal sector was described as people seeking income opportunities through self-employment because of their exclusion from formal wage employment (Hart, 1973) and usually for more than mere subsistence (Portes & Haller, 2005). The term garnered a negative connotation when the ILO equated informality with poverty in urban contexts and framed it to be synonymous with low levels of skill, capital, and organization; family ownership of enterprises; or small scale operations where labour-intensive production was based on out-dated technology and where unregulated and competitive markets resulted in low levels of productivity and savings (ILO, 2002). These negative notions of informality are being challenged as some researchers now see the informal sector as a “seedbed” for entrepreneurial dynamism rather than a hindrance to development (Losby, et al., 2003; Williams, 2007). Others have described how people use the informal system to recover some economic power, particularly in highly centralized countries, to avoid institutional rules or because they are denied protection by these rules and institutions (Feige, 1990). Therefore, “street-sellers in the Dominican Republic and Somalia, through to informal garment businesses in India and the Philippines, to home-based microenterprises in Mexico and Martinique” (Williams 2007, p. 121) become the foci for enterprise and entrepreneurship potential, creativity, dynamism, and innovation (ILO, 2002b). Moreover, UNDP research suggests that in developing countries the informal sector is taking the lead in innovation as opposed to multinational firms. Based on a reconfigured understanding of the informal sector and its important role in the developing world, the IID program will support research that examines how these informal activities can become more effective and efficient, specifically focusing on the ways they can lead to improved livelihoods and eventually inclusive development. Livelihood can simply refer to a source of income in its most narrow definition. But it becomes a broader concept within the “Sustainable Livelihoods” (SL) Framework where it is comprised of the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources), and activities required for a means of living (Chambers & Conway, 1992). Not being poor means that people can sustain and enhance these capabilities and assets, and cope with and recover from various stresses and shocks (Schilderman, 2002). Inclusive development is understood here as development that reduces poverty and enables all groups of people to contribute to creating opportunities, sharing the benefits of development, and participating in decision-making.


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Box 2 - Innovating with local intermediaries

IDRC’s iBoP Asia project shows that interactions between communities and intermediaries are pivotal to innovations that improve livelihoods of poor people:

In the Philippines, the intermediary -- a social microenterprise -- worked with a network of “sari-sari” stores and enabled women entrepreneurs to adopt a new business model to legally include affordable generic drugs in their product range.

In Cambodia, a local NGO became a ‘technology intermediary” for floating poor communities to develop the world’s first community-based human waste treatment barge.

In Vietnam, a more formal actor, the Center for Marine Conservation and Development, assisted coastal communities to improve their informal eco-tourism services.

In the Philippines, the Jeepney cooperative of taxi operators intermediated between a research and training centre, the local government and a fast food chain, to enable fuel cost savings by converting waste cooking oil into biodiesel.

IID’s research will be organized around three themes: the role of women in informal sector innovation; intermediaries that bridge informal and formal sectors; and activities essential to livelihoods in the informal sector. Women: Particular attention will be placed on women because they constitute two-thirds of the informal sector producers and traders; yet, their interactions with technological and scientific knowledge and practices are often unrecognized. In fact, after decades of STI for development, women’s positions and livelihoods in their communities have declined in comparison to men (Huyer, 2004). IID will support research that examines women’s roles as informal sector innovators and entrepreneurs as well as how informal sector innovations specifically impact women’s livelihoods. Intermediaries: Within the formal innovation system, intermediaries are seen as bridging agents between firms that help them commercialize, scale up and diffuse innovations (Howells, 2006). In the context of the informal sector, recent case studies indicate that similar players help informal enterprises find new technologies, products, markets, and even overcome many bottlenecks (Box 2); yet understanding of these informal intermediaries’ roles and potentials to take innovations to scale, remain limited in developing countries. Informal sector activities: Research will focus on activities important to livelihoods in informal settings, including natural resources, services, and cultural industries. Examples of natural resources-based industries include mining and fishing and production of medicines, cosmetics, furniture, and biofuels. Services include transportation, vehicle maintenance, construction, and waste management and reuse. Cultural industries include crafts, art, design, as well as ecological and cultural tourism. In summary, to examine these issues, IID will support interdisciplinary research that seeks to understand the underpinnings of innovative activities in the informal sector. It will also examine ways in which informal enterprises respond to, interact with, and influence existing social, economic, and policy structures as well as bottlenecks in developing countries. IID-supported research will focus on how informal enterprises build capacities to generate sustainable livelihoods and engage strategically with, for example, other enterprises (formal or informal), financial service providers, government


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agencies, development practitioners, and communities. These interactions help informal enterprises identify specific demands for affordable and niche goods and services, enhance their resource base, overcome bottlenecks, mitigate risks, and improve business and investment opportunities through innovation.

b. About the program The IID program will support the development of research tools and methods, case study syntheses, and analyses of innovation by and with the informal sector. Program choices: The program will not support top-down research on innovations for the poor, without their involvement. The IID program will also not support research on innovation for food production as the Centre’s program on Agriculture and Food Security (AFS) is already working in this area. There is however complementarity with AFS on issues relating to innovation in natural resources-based livelihoods as well as on informality with the Centre program on Supporting Inclusive Growth (SIG). IID will pursue Intra-IDRC collaboration with both these programs where there are obvious opportunities for synergy. Field building: IDRC has a long standing legacy in field building. For example, it has constructed the field of Ecohealth by bringing together the fields of environmental studies and public health as well as constructed the field of ICTs for Development (ICT4D) by bringing together the fields of soft- and hard-ware engineering and development studies. The development of the IID field, which will bring together the research fields of innovation studies and development studies, will be supported by and also contribute to Centre learning in the area of field building. Building on strengths: The field of IID is emerging from the Centre’s continued commitment to S&T, which goes back to its very early days of supporting science and technology policy reviews in several developing countries (Box 3). It also builds on two exploratory activities: In 2001, Research on Knowledge Systems (RoKS) explored the ways in which knowledge is produced, communicated, and applied to development problems, and investigated the policy and institutional frameworks that govern this process. The 2003 Task Force on Biotechnology and Emerging Technologies shared a similar focus as it reviewed the most controversial applications of biotechnology and nanotechnology related to poverty alleviation.


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After several years of not having a dedicated Centre program on STI, a new program on Innovation, Technology and Society (ITS), building on RoKS and the New Technologies Task Force, was approved in 2006. ITS culminated past learning by integrating new understandings about the more complex nature of the processes behind STI as well as the realization that innovation in developing countries means more than R&D and crosses over the exclusive boundaries of laboratories and firms. Several ITS-funded projects revealed the program’s strength and the potential focus on innovation in the informal sector. They helped to raise the issue on the broader research agenda. Partly a result of ITS projects, the Indonesian Science Granting Council is incorporating the links between innovation and poverty alleviation in its strategic plan and the Chinese State Council for Higher Education has approved the establishment of a PhD program on grassroots innovation at Tianjin University. In Latin America, IDRC-supported researchers investigating “social technologies” were asked to design specialized courses and convene ministerial round-tables. The closing workshop of the “Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid” project brought together 30 participants representing national science granting councils and universities in Southeast Asian countries who are interested in moving to a second phase—a promising sign that formal actors are interested in fostering innovations with and by the informal sector. A project on building capacity in STI indicators has resulted in the publication of two books that are now being used to train researchers in the development of indicators to measure innovation in the informal sector in Africa. The program also funded a joint OECD–UNESCO workshop that brought together innovation and development scholars and resulted in the book, Innovation for Development: Converting Knowledge to Value (Kramer-Mbula & Wamae, 2010).

2001-2006 The Exploration Years

•Research on Knowledge Systems (RoKS) –Explored ways in which

knowledge is produced, communicated and applied to development problems and the policy and institutional frameworks that govern this process. •Task Force on Biotechnology and Emerging Technologies – To review

biotechnology applications as they relate to food security, agriculture and poverty alleviation. Later it expanded to nanotechnology and converging technologies.

2006-2011 Emergence of the Field

•Innovation, Technology and Society (ITS) – Built on RoKS and

New Technologies projects while creating its own portfolio under three pillars:

innovation systems actors,

science and technology policies,

impacts and inclusion of transformative technologies.

2011-2016 Building a new field

•Innovation for Inclusive Development (IID) – a new field

where innovation systems and development studies converge to contribute to inclusive development. IID will transition projects focused on science and technology policy reviews and emerging technologies.

Box 3: The Past Decade and Future of S&T Programing at IDRC


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Consistent with the themes outlined in the 2010-2015 Strategic Framework for STI programming, universities and science granting councils will figure prominently in IID. The program will support research by, and on, universities, and build their capacity to “cross the street” and examine innovation in the informal sector as a means to lead to inclusive development. IID will introduce science granting councils to the premise of innovation for inclusive development as a sensitizing concept (Patton, 2010). These capacity building projects will encourage them to increase their support for innovation in the informal sector in order to alleviate poverty and inequality. An analysis of the development context and knowledge gaps suggests that IDRC’s niche in STI is innovation for inclusive development. This is an emerging area of strength for the program. An external consultation with STI experts revealed that they saw real promise in IDRC focussing on innovation that alleviates poverty and funding research that demonstrates the links between these areas and the formal STI sector. A donor scan and consultation further confirmed this niche. Few other donors provide funding in the area of innovation for poverty alleviation and fewer still support research that systemically addresses interactions, joint learning, and capability building among important actors that bridge the informal and formal sectors. 2. Approach to Programming

a. Program Goal

IID’s goal is to enable greater understanding of how innovation in the informal sector can improve livelihoods and contribute to inclusive development. The program will strive to produce evidence that will influence actors in the formal innovation system, such as universities, science granting councils, policy makers, firms, and intermediaries, to broaden their perspectives in order to create policy instruments and processes that help transform marginal innovative activities in the informal sector into sustainable innovations that have wider impact and stronger links with the formal sector.

b. Program Outcomes The program has three inter-related key outcomes—capacity building, knowledge generation, and research use. Capacity Building: Innovation for Inclusive Development is an emerging field of research that is currently composed of two separate bodies of research—innovation studies and development studies. Researchers in these two fields are currently working in isolation; therefore, a key goal of IID programming will be to build researcher capacity in this new field of research. In order to build a field of research, researchers will need to construct its language and concepts. The development of these tools and research methods will signal the field’s progress, particularly once a critical mass of researchers begin to use these tools and methods to study the ways in which innovation leads to improved livelihoods and inclusive development.


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Knowledge Generation: Generating knowledge about how innovations in the informal sector can lead to inclusive development through improved livelihoods will encompass two main areas: The first area is around IID’s entry points of women and intermediaries, including the role of women as entrepreneurs. It deals with the impacts of innovation on women; the role of intermediaries in addressing bottlenecks; and their role in facilitating linkages with the formal sector. The second area in which the program will generate knowledge is innovation in activities essential to livelihoods in the informal sector including natural resources, services, and cultural industries. The production of credible, objective, evidence will be crucial to influence policies that encourage formal sector actors to support innovation in informal sector settings.

Research use and Policy Influence: Both during and following the process of generating knowledge, the program will strengthen research recipient capacity to interact with policy makers. For instance, in the project to strengthen capacities of universities and science granting councils in South East Asia, the program will work to influence science granting councils in four countries to explicitly include innovation for inclusive development in their strategic plans and implement follow-up research funding strategies with universities in the region. Researchers will also interact with UNESCO and the OECD because these organizations are interested in better conceptualizing and measuring innovation in the informal sector. IID will also support recipients to communicate how improving livelihoods through innovation in the informal sector is might enhance global governance in post MDG framework debates.

Table 1 presents, in a graduated way, the baseline as well as examples of minimum, medium, and high outcomes that IID could achieve. The baseline gives a sense of the field at the time of starting the prospectus. Program success depends on a longer-term strategy; however, some small successes might be possible depending on contexts. A key goal in building this new research field is to support the development of an evolving global network of researchers but whose members are from both developed and developing countries. To achieve this goal, the program will develop an explicit strategy to support the development of leadership in the South.


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Table 1: Summary of Expected Program Outcomes

Baseline Minimum Medium High

Capacity b

uild

ing a

nd f

ield

build

ing

Researchers

struggle in isolation

to find common

language, concepts

and principles for

research on

innovation for

inclusive

development

Science granting

councils and

intermediaries are

unaware of or do

not appreciate IID

concept and its role

A global research

network is formed and

starts developing

common language

and methodologies for

research on informal

sector innovations

Science granting

councils, universities

and intermediaries

begin participating in

activities that

incorporate innovation

studies and

development studies

A set of new

frameworks,

methodologies and

metrics for studying

informal sector

innovations are

developed. This will

involve collaboration

with international

organizations such as

UNESCO and the

OECD.

Working through

international and local

partnerships, IID

researchers lead the

development of a set

of new frameworks,

methodologies and

metrics for studying

informal sector

innovations

National science

granting councils and

universities

incorporate IID into

their research funding

and teaching agendas

Know

ledge

ge

nera

tion

Developing country

researchers ignore

or are unaware of

innovations in the

informal sector and

how they can

contribute to

sustainable

livelihoods

Research leads to

context-specific

understanding of how

innovations and

intermediaries in the

informal sector affect

sustainable livelihoods

Research on how

innovations in the

informal sector lead to

sustainable livelihoods

and the role of

intermediaries is

published and cited by

peers

Rigorous synthesis of

research reveals

findings on how

innovations and the

role of intermediaries

in the informal sector

affect sustainable

livelihoods

Researc

h u

se a

nd

po

licy in

flue

nce

Policy and decision

makers and formal

sector

intermediaries are

unaware or dismiss

the importance of

informal sector

innovations

IID researchers inform

local policies and

practices with context-

specific evidence on

what constrains

informal sector

innovations

Policy/decision

makers and

intermediaries request

IID researchers to

inform policies and

practices. For

example being invited

to STI round tables

and the development

of STI plans

National, regional and

international policies

and regulations on

innovation in the

informal sector are

influenced by

evidence from

context-specific and

synthetic research.

Intermediaries help

innovations in the

informal sector go to

scale based on

research from context-

specific and/or

synthetic research.


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3. Program Strategy Strategies for helping to build the IID field, transition particular ITS activities, and address cross-cutting issues are described below. Strategies for Building the IID Field Complementary strategies for building the IID field and achieve its outcomes include:

Support for networking: The program will follow an explicit strategy to support interdisciplinary research networks to deepen and accelerate learning. Sub-regional networks will be strengthened and globally networked with the GRIID research group and others. Existing projects to be networked include “grassroots innovation”, “pro-poor innovation” and “innovation for inclusive development” in South Asia, “innovation at the base of the pyramid (iBoP-Asia)” in Southeast Asia, “social technologies” in Latin America, a project on building capacity for STI indicators in Africa, and one on innovation in the BRICS countries.

Building Network Capacity: The program will follow complete capacity building (IDRC Evaluation Unit, 2007), in order to strengthen the ability of the networks to undertake and manage research and put it to use. This approach involves building capacity in multiple areas. Training could be given to network members on, for instance, social and gender analysis, research communications, and evaluation. It could also mean providing administrative training and capacity building for managing network members and sub-granting relationships across organizations and countries.

Building Southern leadership: A key and explicit tactic within the program’s networking strategy is to enable Southern leadership to emerge. Through a range of capacity building approaches, including those described above, fellowships and awards and the development of university courses, a set of Southern students and scholars, will be encouraged to participate in building the IID field.

Knowledge generation: One of the key ways to develop these concepts and ideas is to consolidate research findings from existing case studies. Once common issues emerge from these case studies, IID will begin to support pilot participatory research projects in several regions that involve key stakeholders (boundary partners, such as informal sector actors, particularly women, intermediaries, and policy makers). The purpose of these participatory studies will be to identify innovative activities taking place in the informal sector and the policy or institutional bottlenecks they face.

Scholarly publications: The intended strategy is to partner with the new journal Innovation and Development (Routledge), which was established in 2010, to help make it a preeminent publication with a strong Southern voice that helps to build the IID field.


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Transition of ITS activities

Over its five years of programming, the program will devote at least 80% of its program funds to the core field, while 10% will be reserved to new and emerging issues. Given the greater focus of programming around IID, the program will use the final 10% to transition several existing activities:

Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Reviews: Informing the development, review, and implementation of national STI policies so that they incorporate IID will be part of the program’s on-going work. However, each year, the Centre receives several requests for support for the development and review of national STI policies, with elements far beyond the scope of IID. These STI policy reviews have generally had a very high return in terms of policy influence, but a mixed record in terms of building capacity, as they are often carried out by international specialists, rather than local researchers. The program intends to transition these activities to a Southern network of interested countries and organizations that would be interested in building local and regional capacity for conducting these reviews.

Socio-economic impacts of Emerging Technologies: ITS-supported research has resulted in biosafety policy recommendations and “good practices” for assessing socio-economic impacts of genetically modified crops on small-scale farmers in developing countries. An impact assessment “toolkit” is being developed within existing projects to assist developing countries integrate socio-economic assessments into policy-making processes. Other donors and foundations have indicated an interest to continue this work and IID will support the formation of a global network of researchers and other stakeholders as a way of transitioning this programming.

Science Journalism: ITS has supported a number of science journalism projects in the past, including peer training for the development of science journalism in Africa and the Middle East, as well as core-support for the Science and Development Network (Scidev.Net). These activities are important to the Centre as a whole and these projects will be transitioned into cross-cutting funding to be managed by IID and the Communications Division and funded by Forward Planning.

Cross cutting issues IID will address cross-cutting issues in the Centre’s strategic framework as follows:

Global governance: Poverty indicators now point to a “new Bottom Billion” of people living in multi-dimensional poverty in middle income countries. The program will seek to communicate how improving livelihoods through innovation in the informal sector is crucial to global governance in post-MDG framework debates. The program will seek recipients to engage in the lead-up debates to the UN high-level summit in September 2013. A policy influence strategy to work with the OECD,


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UNCTAD, and/or UNESCO, which are already interested parties in the research outputs from this program, will be given priority planning via several active projects.

Gender: As already described, the program has an explicit focus on women and will support gender analysis research capacity building.

Within IID, ICTs will not be a main entry-point; however, they will be addressed in so far as they relate to innovative services that contribute to livelihoods in informal settings, such as the sale and maintenance of cellphones.

4. Regional and Thematic Priorities This section reviews the regional aspects that are pertinent for shaping IID’s programming. Figure 3 shows a preliminary assessment of low- and middle-income country innovation systems and policies. As previously noted, there is a high correlation between countries with structured systems and their overall level of development; however, many middle income countries are also witnessing significant inequality and poverty. As discussed below, IID programming will be responsive to regional contexts, however, networks that link countries across regions with similar characteristics may also be pursued—for example, a network of low-income countries with entry or fractional innovation systems, or another of BRICS-plus countries, that have structured


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innovation systems, but nevertheless, large informal sectors with only marginal innovative activities.

Despite recent improvement in Africa’s overall economic performance, it contains some of the world’s poorest countries. Three quarters of Africans live in low-income settlements. Informal employment represents 72% of non-agricultural employment in the region and up to 78% when South Africa is excluded (ILO 2002). Understanding the dynamics of the informal sector in Africa and devising strategies to empower marginalized people by adding value to livelihoods through innovation is thus crucial. Specific attention will be given to universities, the private sector, and intermediary


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organizations—mostly NGOs—and the way in which they help to build and channel innovative capacities in the informal sector. IID’s active project on the governance, quality and relevance of university research in West Africa, and lessons from the closed 4th RoKS competition “Developmental Universities: A Changing Role for Universities in the South” are expected to provide relevant lessons for future programming. The Middle East and North Africa has suffered from decades of low STI investment, political interference in agenda setting, and low quality and quantity of research output. Recent developments may offer a niche for IID programming in MENA. First, there were signs of increasing respect for the value of science in the region, accompanied by some significant investments by higher income countries. For instance, Turkey increased it spending on R&D by 600% over the last 10 years. Second, is the 2011, so-called Arab Spring. However, the number of unemployed, disaffected youth is a key challenge in MENA, and growing numbers of unemployed people continue to join the informal economy, which exacerbates the situation by pushing wages down (Saif & Choucar, 2009). Improving the lives and livelihoods of those within the informal sector will be critical to sustain the movement towards greater democracy in the region, and thus offers a clear niche for IID. At the same time, potential democratization of institutions in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, such as rescinding the requirement of security agency approval for research and the election of University Presidents and Deans may ease the top-down approach to innovation and influence formal STI actors to be more open to an IID approach. Programming in this region will be informed by the on-going IID project on the Atlas of Islamic Innovation, which is mapping and evaluating the changing landscape of STI in countries across MENA. Asia, home to two thirds of the world’s poor with population expected to reach 5 billion over the next 20 years, is also a region where the informal sector is prominent as it contributes 41% to GDP. Rapid urbanization is putting significant challenges on access to basic services and the environment. In order to address these challenges, a growth trajectory that is inclusive and ultimately contributes to sustainable livelihoods is required. Building on its work in the region, in particular, the Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid project (IBoP), IID will support research that focuses on enhancing innovative capabilities in the urban informal sector and in rural areas while linking these researchers to the global networks mentioned above. Emphasis will be placed on the network of universities that are currently building capacity to focus curriculum and research on innovations in the informal sector. Parallel economies exist and function in most Latin American countries. Although the informal economy is large and accounts for about 29% of GDP, many questions still exists about its composition, size, and effects on economic growth. For example, controversy has arisen about whether the informal economy is a manifestation of poverty or can be a potential solution to poverty. The gender dimension to informality is important as women are over-represented in informal employment, receive lower pay, and belong to precarious occupational groups. Around three quarters of the population in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region live in towns and cities, making it the world’s most urbanized developing region. The programming focus on “social


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technologies” will continue, although the group of researchers in this area will be networked with others building the field of innovations for inclusive development. Linkages with universities, particularly in Central America and the Caribbean, will be strengthened through developing a network of LAC universities to pilot curriculum and research related to innovation in the informal sector. 5. Concluding comments

After a period of internal reflection and external consultation, the program team identified innovation for inclusive development as the niche where IDRC could make a difference. IID aims to address the problem of the “new Bottom Billion” in the informal sector. The program aims to produce knowledge and influence policy to transform marginal innovative activities in the informal sector to sustainable innovations that have wider impact and improve people’s livelihoods. After the end of the five year program cycle, IID intends to have contributed to building an inter-disciplinary field on innovation that leads to inclusive development through improved and sustainable livelihoods. It will also have transitioned national STI policy review activities to Southern networks and have in place a “network of networks” of researchers working in the area of innovation for inclusive development that will help shape global agendas around the post-MDG framework.


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Innovation for Inclusive Development Program Prospectus for 2011-2016

Education

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