Thornton Philip, Mason D'Croz Daniel, Kugler Cody, Remans Roseline, Zornetzer Heather, Herrero Mario
Department of Global Development, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Glob Food Sec. 2024 Mar;40:100738. doi: 10.1016/j.gfs.2023.100738.
It is widely accepted that current food systems are not on a trajectory for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by the end of the decade. Technological innovation will have a considerable role to play in different parts of the food system; many promising options exist or are in the pipeline, some of which may be highly disruptive to existing value chains. Scaling up the innovations required, at the same time as protecting those who may lose out in the short term, will require a strong enabling environment. Here we apply an existing framework of eight change accelerators to six case studies of historical agricultural innovation. We estimated the degree to which each accelerator had been addressed at some stage in the innovation process, as a measure of the gap between what was needed and what was achieved. For the innovations that are being taken to scale and widely utilized, these accelerator gaps are small. Uptake of other innovations is stalled, and for these we found large gaps for one or more of the eight accelerators. Impactful innovation processes address all eight change accelerators at some point, with different phasing of the accelerators depending on the nature of the technology and on the impact pathway being pursued. This simple framework, when used in combination with narratives of uptake based on theories of change and impact pathways, may provide an effective means of screening future innovation processes to help prioritize and guide investment that can lead to more resilient, sustainable and equitable food systems.
人们普遍认为，当前的粮食系统无法在本十年末实现可持续发展目标。技术创新将在粮食系统的不同环节发挥重要作用；存在许多有前景的选择或正在筹备中，其中一些可能会对现有价值链造成极大冲击。在扩大所需创新规模的同时，保护那些短期内可能会受损失的人，将需要一个强大的有利环境。在此，我们将现有的八个变革加速器框架应用于六个历史农业创新案例研究。我们估计了每个加速器在创新过程的某个阶段得到解决的程度，以此衡量所需与实际达成之间的差距。对于正在扩大规模并得到广泛应用的创新，这些加速器差距较小。其他创新的推广陷入停滞，我们发现这些创新在八个加速器中的一个或多个方面存在较大差距。有影响力的创新过程在某个阶段会涉及所有八个变革加速器，加速器的不同阶段取决于技术的性质和所追求的影响路径。这个简单的框架，与基于变革理论和影响路径的推广叙述相结合时，可能提供一种有效的方法来筛选未来的创新过程，以帮助确定投资的优先次序并加以引导，从而实现更具韧性、可持续和公平的粮食系统。
