This guidebook is designed for practitioners, managers, researchers, educators, and just about anyone else familiar with or interested in innovation systems thinking, human and organizational capacity development, institutional learning and change, or agriculture and rural development.
This guidebook will especially benefit people and organizations involved in designing and implementing programs and activities that strengthen agricultural innovation systems, or some element of a system.
Understanding an agricultural innovation system well enough to make an accurate diagnosis and then design appropriate capacity development strategies is no small task. But addressing the same problem in the same old ways will inevitably yield similar results. This guidebook will enhance users’ knowledge and skills and help them to avoid the pitfall of repetition by walking them through a novel process to
- identify challenges, opportunities, and leverage points
- map an innovation system and develop a deeper understanding of that system
- diagnose challenges in the system, determine if capacity development can help address those challenges, and create a theory of change
- match capacity needs with appropriate capacity development tools and approaches
