This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on...

Sanitation is at the heart of not only environmental security but also food security and health. Today about 41% of the global population or about 2.6 billion people do not have access to toilets and about 42,000 people die every week due to drinking water polluted with faecal matter. The...

This paper addresses two prominent issues on the development of small enterprises in Africa. Which factors inhibit or foster innovation activities in small enterprises? Do innovators create more jobs? We use a large set of microenterprises survey data from Ethiopia that comprise 1000...

In this paper, we examine how transnational corruption affects host country firms' innovation behaviour and performance in transition economies of Eastern Europe and Central and Western Asia. Using firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, we show that the...

Between 1970 and 2000 the proportion of global R&D occurring in low income economies rose from two percent to more than 20 percent. However, this rising commitment to R&D does not easily translate into the emergence of a family of innovations meeting the needs of low income consumers "at the...

The recognition that innovation occurs in networks of heterogeneous actors and requires broad systemic support beyond knowledge brokering has resulted in a changing landscape of the intermediary domain in an increasingly market-driven agricultural sector in developing countries. This paper...

The analysis of the impact of innovation on employment growth is an important topic for policy makers, because (un)employment is an important social topic, and the effects of innovation on employment are often poorly understood. Despite the significant importance of this relationship, very few...

It is commonly believed that the business environment in developing countries does not allow productive technology-based entrepreneurship to flourish. In this paper, we draw on the experience of Indian software firms where entrepreneurial growth has belied these predictions. This paper argues...

Knowledge brokering has been explored in the innovation literature to understand how different innovation tasks are organised toward technological development. This paper reflects upon the role of different organisations as knowledge brokers in regulatory policy processes towards putting...

This paper is a synthesis of research undertaken as part of the Research Into Use programme (RIU) to explore the question of how agricultural research can be used more effectively to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihoods in developing countries. Many of the challenges the...