Tschirley delivers keynote address during Innovation Lab Council 2024 Regional Partner’s Meeting

Sierra Jezuit<jezuitsi@msu.edu> -

The Innovation Lab Council 2024 Regional Partner’s Meeting offers opportunities for learning across Labs and partners regarding their experience in bringing Lab innovations to scale

This week, USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab leaders, many of their local partners, government officials from Nepal and other key stakeholders are coming together for the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab Council 2024 Regional Partner’s Meeting, “Translating Research to Action – Opportunities for Evidence-Based Scaling of Agri-Food Systems Innovations.” Hosted in Kathmandu, Nepal, this gathering provides opportunities for learning across Labs and partners regarding their experience in bringing Lab innovations to scale.

David Tschirley, director of the USAID-funded Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Policy and Influence (PRCI), set the tone of the gathering in one of the meeting’s two keynote addresses. In his presentation, entitled “Innovation, localization, and the messy path to nth-best scaled solutions,” Tschirley conceives scaling of innovations as the outcome of a “deep localization” process of dialogue and bargaining among multiple stakeholders and emphasizes how dynamic, unpredictable and “messy” the process is.  He notes that the inevitable outcome of this process is “nth-best solutions,” which he defines as the best available solution given the dynamics and constraints of the system one is operating in. Such outcomes are typically far from what a researcher would consider “best,” yet the alternative often is that no solution emerges at all.

The bottom-line message from Tschirley’s presentation is that transformation and innovation are happening without any input from ILs, and the job of ILs is to understand these processes of transformation and “figure out how to bring added value to them” through their research and potential innovations. He emphasized that this understanding needs to inform both “what the Labs work on and how they work on it.” 

A key objective of the remainder of the meeting is to begin a process of Labs learning from each other, leading to a consensus on good practices to increase the impact of their work.

Access Tschirley's presentation below
Innovation, localization, and the messy path to nth-best scaled solutions

 

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