Measuring innovation is cristal clear when a patent, an utility model, a plant variety or a new trade mark is developed by researchers. However, when social or institutional innovations are developed, or technology transfer is done with peasants or small farmers, innovation is very difficult to measure.
It is difficult to mesure if we insist to believe that productivity is just writing more papers that no body reads, except other champions of "productivity". Cominment is the real starting point to do something to reduce poverty in countries like ours.
No doubt, commitment is a basic part of "doing". Question was, how to measure results of "doing", how to "register facts, actions", so we can measure them, hold them in time?, make them a true institutional "milestone", a clearcut difference in the research &development program.
Of course it can be measured. We did it in Sierra Norte de Oaxaca. The manuals are available. You need to have a base line and then to measure the change. We measured the increment in family income, in productivity, in several other áreas. This ideas can be applied to institutions. Academically you can measured the number of person pertaining to the SNI, you can meadured the number of project approved in national and international convocatories, you can account the amount of money entering to the institution by mean of international projects. In this case your are centering your action in having the human resources qualified to the task of generating new ideas to be transfered to the small farmer and the money to generate these ideas. Without these two ingredient there is not progress. The second thing is to take these ideas to the farmers (Norman Borlaugh dix it) an there you can measured the degree of adoption of the new technologies, the increment in family income, the quality of the life (potable water, sanitary services, etc). It can be done. It has been done. The worst thing that can happens to an institution like yours and mine is to look only to the inside believing that advancement and progress is controlling every movement of the institutional life and producing rules for almost any action. We are killing the drive and the interest to work in the sustantial subject established in the institutional mision. Only two projects were accepted in the last CONACYT openning. It is a shame. This happens in our institution. In addition,there are people that think that the real progress is only be creative and some other that believe that transfering technology is the solution. The true is in between. My question is: who is going to generate the appropriate technology to be transferred if everybody dedicated his effort to transfer information? . We need to listen to actors and then generate the change. Any action must bottom up and no the opposite.
Disculpen que no lo haga en ingles, porque el mio es muy rudimentrio. Pero puedo afrimar que si es posible pero se requieren de periodos de tiempo mínimos de cuatro a seis años y estudios regionales previos, Un aspecto crucial a considerar es el denominado capital social y que cada comunidad gestionará sus cambios de forma partticular. Desgraciadamente nuestra clase gobernante tiene metas cortoplasistas y ve como una agresión as sus intereses la deseada autogestión. Como sucede a menudo con las instiutciones educativas, que proclaman el autodidactismo pero en reralidad practican las horas "pompa", como parte de las curriuclas escolares descontextulaizadas. Disculpen el posible exabrupto pero los que vivimos en fomra cotidfiana.la terca realidad, no podemos pintarla de rosa. Lo peor es que la crisis mundial, será mas grave en ibero américa. Además si el magro presupuesto agropecuairo nacional es botin político, como se observa en las noticias cotidianas, No las de telvisa y azteca, no se necesita ser pitonizo para preveer el resultado. Nada me sustaria mas que aceptar que estaba equivocado dentro algunos meses...
We have had the support of international agencies to generate research & development programs with peasants on their lands and real social, political conditions. For that, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary teams were created. What we learned after 20 years is: it is necessary to view an interactive area of teaching-research-transferring as the real context to work. It means a continuum. That idea is supposed to rule our actions but…
How to measure that in time? Let us see publications on the change for instance of Colocassia sculentum :taro, coco yam, Malanga going from a wild undomesticated plant to an export crop at least in 5 regions of Mexico. Farmers are now doing drip irrigation in malanga fields at Sinaloa State, exporting production to USA. Our Federal Council that regulate research and associated funds is now opening a program to promote those actions. Papers for themselves do not change things. Action does change.
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Olguin_Palacios/publications
So... if a good technology was developed by good researchers, and a good interdisciplinary team did a great job in the field with a conspicuous group of farmers, lets say.. during 5 years, and great results are in sight... and life changed in the community... how do we record those facts, so nobody questions its relevance and impact? I am starting to belive taht is not a single paper or a movie, or a talk, or a visit to the community what is needed to record the innovation... I belive a good portfolio that embraces all these facts will be a winner. Because importance of a paper is questioned even by the developers themselves, a movie is also a temporal record of the innovation, a benefit cost annalysisi is fine, but is not always obtained, changes in helthn and child development is sometimes too much to ask (but if we have it, it is even better). A good portfolio with all those facts, might be the answer. Do you agree?
When farmers keep doing things (as they learned from the transdsciplinary team) even if our institutions are not any more in their fields, success is evident. Increasing volumes of taro production recorded for some institutiones like financing agencies may confirm that.
Increasing consumption of wáter spinach (Ipomea aquatica) at Sierra de Santa Marta, Veracruz, Mexico is another succssesful example . We do not know where are the many villages consuming this nutriitious plant.
It has been diseminated mainly by de female population. They learned with us the benefits of team working. That is what counts.
El garbanzo de a libra que significa la promoción del cultivo de la Malanga merece mas reconocimientos de los que ha recibido. Hasta antes de ese hecho se importaba un barco anualmente con malanga africana, para los alimentos infantiles, hoy es exporta y es lo que la hace atractivo a pesar de su alto costo hídirco y económico. Pero en cuantas comunidades mexicanas se puede repetir la experiencia o similares. Sobretodo con una de las limosna promotoras de la corrupción llamada procampo, cuyos objetivos originales nunca se cumplieron.
Again, give me more ideas on how to RECORD an INNOVATION? If a cent is given to a group of researchers to develop a research line that eventually gives birth to a good sound innovation, how can we link that cent with final results? This is not a trivial question. It is needed to ask for more money to funding agencies, governments, politicians, and users of the technology. Only Carlos Olguin has given some ideas. Please send me a pile of ideas.
Review MIAF experience and you will get the answer to your questions. It is a pitty that the Colegio de Postgraduados removed (or hidden) the page that documented this case of success...
Now I know that MIAF is a truly successful experience. However I could not find clearly happens when the institution is gradually withdrawn. Start buying their inputs? They accept paying for the services needed to continue? At what pace? What happens to the benefit / cost during the process? It requires continually verify this because the experience can easily be converted into another project welfare-clientelist
Previous experience on the topic: TECNOLOGÍA AGROACUÍCOLA EN LA CUENCA BAJA DEL RÍO PAPALOAPAN1 LA EXPERIENCIA DEL CAMPUS VERACRUZ DEL COLEGIO DE POSTGRADUADOS Carlos Olguín Palacios, María del Carmen Alvarez Avila y Alberto Asiain Hoyos Foto de la portada: Carlos Olguín (1988).
ABSTRACT The challenge has been taken to use resources terrestrial and aquatic of tropical lowlands for the benefit of its inhabitants, minimally altering the natural environment. This is what this paper is meant by agro-aquaculture technology. This is to conserve water, instead of draining it as a fundamental substrate indispensable to sustain agricultural productivity and biodiversity. For this, considers not only the perception of the problem and the objectives of the group of academics but also, in the stages of transfer, the producers cultural view.
Translation of title: AGRI-AQUA CULTURE TECHNOLOGY IN THE LOWER RIVER BASIN PAPALOAPAN. VERACRUZ CAMPUS EXPERIENCE OF POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL, MEXICO
Thanks, Carlos, Jorge and Régulo for your inputs. It was a very nice brain storming.
The institutional effort involved in promoting the cultivation of taro (malanga, Colocasia esculenta) deserves more recognition than it has received. Until that fact a boat was imported annually with African taro for infant food industry. Today is exported and is what makes it attractive despite its high water and economic cost. But ... how many Mexican communities or regions can repeat the experience or similar? especially with funds that promote corruption, such as Procampo, whose original objectives were never fulfilled.
In Mexico, 50% of the total value of agricultural production and the production of food of animal origin are concentrated in seven states: amongst which is Veracruz, which is the state where I work with Co-innovation on integrated multitrophic systems to the agri-aquacultural production dynamics of the rural family as a strategy to improve increase their food security.
Of the 5.3 million Rural Economic Units (REU) in the country, business REU represent only 8.7% of the REU and generated 74.2% of sales in the sector, of which 50% are also concentrated in seven states : Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Tamaulipas and Baja California (SAGARPA and FAO, 2012).
22.4% of the REU are classified as "family subsistence without linkage to the market" and 50.6% are "family subsistence market attachment"; these two layers correspond to REU whose members are in poverty, given the levels of income they earn (SAGARPA and FAO, 2012). In the first there is greater participation of women, and greater relative presence of people who speak an indigenous language. The output gap, capital, skills and income between family subsistence units (with and without market access) and business is very large (FAO et al., 2013), and every day is greater, so that from my view is that public policies need to support communities with greater poverty and marginalization holistically and create mechanisms to ensure the production and consumption of foods at Community level.
Probably these are much "numbers" but I think it would be appropriate to point out first that segment of the study will address REU to design a strategy for evaluation and monitoring of effective innovation.
Because if it is true that for business REU is easy to follow considering inputs and outputs of money, GDP and many other indicators of "development" that can be used at the level of macroeconomics, definitely most of these indicators can not be used to measure the impact of innovation in the rest of the REU, or whether we speak of 83% of the REU my country have!.
And if we consider that even in the REU family subsistence market attachment, there is a high rate of illiteracy among women; the strategy becomes even more difficult to design, so that innovation is truly an innovation. That is, for people to realy adopt the proposed technology we want to convey.
In agriculture, as in aquaculture production cycles are not counted in years, so the proposal focuses on measuring the "before" and "after" the introduction of innovation to the REU. One cycle at a time. To see continuous improvement and opportunity´s areas that we could strengthen.
They are not needed years to see if the proposal is far from meeting the expectations of those who try it. For that level of REU, if the proposal is not useful, they do not understand, or can not reach them economically, local knowledge will not appropriate it, so it does not transcend.
So the strategy could focus on establishing the social indicators, economic indicators, environmental indicators, technical indicators and human indicators (perception and attitude); and even political indicators that influence the transfer of product technology concerned.