This literature review marks QUNO’s step back from focusing on intellectual property rights (IPR) to ask more broadly: What are the types of innovation in agriculture that we as a global community want to encourage? From here, we explore the types of policy measures that might do so — including but not limited to IPR.

Innovation in agriculture is most commonly associated with the development and transfer of technologies to farmers (innovation for farmers), or more recently, farmers’ participation in research and development projects to improve the relevancy and usefulness of its outputs (innovation with farmers). However the innovation that happens on the farm (innovation by farmers) has been largely overlooked. Small-scale farmer innovation is not widely recognized within academia or international bodies relating to trade, intellectual property rights, plant genetic resources or biodiversity conservation.

As a result, efforts to promote innovation in agriculture have mostly be concentrated on creating incentives for private sector investment in research and development — commonly by establishing strong intellectual property rights regimes, ensuring open access to markets, and increasing technology adoption rates among farmers. These strategies are generally focused on promoting innovation for and with farmers, rather than nurturing the innovation that is happening all the time on the farm.

The key points distilled from this relatively nascent body of literature include:

• Farmers are driven to innovate for many different reasons, which include but go beyond opportunities to participate in commercial markets.
• Farmers innovate through informal networks of social and economic relations in an iterative and cumulative process, the results of which are not easily attributed to individuals.
• The scope of what is considered ‘innovation’ is broader, including but not limited to the development of new technologies, the adaption of new technologies developed elsewhere to suit local conditions and needs, the active maintenance and further development of plant genetic resources and associated knowledge, and social / organizational innovation to mitigate the affects of climate change and market volatility.  
• Outside entities may support small-scale farmer innovation by increasing exposure of their innovative capacity, facilitating knowledge sharing, providing supplementary support where required and providing financial resources directly to farmers.

There remain significant gaps in the literature:

• The contributions of small-scale farmers to local and global food security, rural livelihoods and agroecosystem resilience is not well documented in academia. More evidence-based research is required.
• Efforts to measure farmers’ innovation in absence of outside intervention are in their infancy.
• There is also limited evaluation of the quality of support currently available to innovative farmers, and it is difficult to isolate farmers’ capacity to innovate while international organizations play an increasingly visible role in participatory research.