Paper short abstract:

How do farm advisory businesses innovate to support inclusive chain-wide innovations? Innovation ecosystem experiences from selected private models emerging in Kenyan agrifood sector

Paper long abstract:

Abstract

Recently, private agricultural extension and advisory services (AEAS) models have emerged, owing to growing demand for knowledge and innovation support among entrepreneurial farmers and other value chain actors, linked to the unfolding agrifood sector transformation in Kenya. At the same time, a new strand of studies on AEAS, inspired by the concept of agricultural innovation system (AIS), have emerged focusing on the roles and contribution of AEAS in brokering multi-actor networks to create shared value for farmers and other actors. However, the value that these different actors bring into the innovation processes and how this is enabled has not been well interrogated empirically. This paper addresses this gap by applying the innovation ecosystem concept as a new perspective for analyzing value co-creation and value capture. Through qualitative fieldwork and review of secondary documents, we explore how two nascent private AEAS models in Kenyan agrifood sector build their innovation ecosystems. Findings show that the ecosystem lens evokes a more compelling conceptualization of AEAS as entailing a complex value proposition that is dependent on other complementary services and requiring focal actors to take the lead in mobilizing and aligning multi-actor contributions to the materialization of the value proposition. We find pre-entry capabilities of founder directors and articulation and popularization of the business concept as main resources and roles, respectively, of the focal actors in building their ecosystems. Main contributions of ecosystem actors are in financial, technical, networking support; content development and validation, and skilling of advisors; and linkages for complementary inputs and services. Value capture mechanisms are both monetary and non-monetary, and direct and indirect. We show that in seeking alignment, the models manipulate both the multi-actor network composition and/or the components of the value proposition by design or through learning from real life experiences. We conclude that the ecosystem perspective offers a systematic approach for visualizing the outlook of an inclusive and productive multi-actor network. However, actor level inclusiveness in ecosystem lens should be evaluated from value addition perspective of end users and not normatively. This points to the need for private firms venturing into AEAS to apply the ecosystem perspective to guide their business strategy processes.

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