This study explores the state of the art of innovation support services within cooperation projects for innovation in Italy to shed light on the variety of actors that are supporting them and the f...

Purpose: This study explores the potential of the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) to assess the technical, economic and environmental effects of cooperative innovation projects at farm level. Design/Methodology/Approach: The analysis of the FADN potential relies on the classification of innovations and the co-identification, through the Most Significant Change (MSC) approach, of the most relevant indicators for tracking and assessing the performances of innovations and attributing to them the effects of a specific innovation. Findings: The study shows that the FADN has a certain range of useful indicators and that they have a good coverage of the different types of innovation. Furthermore, the farm visits let emerge the importance of participatory approaches to capture the different changes and interplays occurred in farming processes. Practical implications: The paper lays the foundations for the adaptation of the current methodology for data collecting and provides useful insights concerning the overcoming representativeness claims, costs’ issues, and problems related to the observation time limit. Theoretical implications: The paper reveals the importance of participatory monitoring and evaluation approaches in helping the collection of more robust and relevant account data on farm, as well as in attributing certain results to a specific innovation and recognising synergies and side-effects of cooperative processes. Originality/Values: The paper provides some recommendations on how to enlarge the scope of the FADN survey in order to be used effectively in the analysis of the performance of cooperative innovations at farm level.

The objectives of this paper are to present the dynamic of organic food and farming (OFF) research and innovation, to outline challenges in deploying programs and accessing funding, and to define key actions to foster the development of tailored quality research on organic farming in Italy. The baseline starts from the main outcomes that emerged during the World Café held in the frame of the Salone Internazionale del biologico e del naturale (SANA Expo) in 2018, where the Italian OFF research community met to build a convergence on scope and modus operandi in the research endeavor. These outcomes were examined in the light of the key features of the research and innovation projects funded in Italy in the last 10 years, respectively by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and the regional administrations through the innovation support instruments in the Rural Development Plan programming periods. In the period 2009–2018, 70 research projects for a total funding of 21.081 million € (<0.1% of the value of the sector) were launched, addressing nine different topic areas. Over a similar period (2007–2019), 53 regional innovation projects addressing organic farming were activated for a total budget of 14.299 million € (<10% of the entire available funding). The implementation of interventions in the research and the innovation areas were often scattered in terms of the topics, disciplines, and types of supply chain/network addressed. The relatively high share of multi/interdisciplinary research and innovation projects as well as the acknowledgement of the multi-actor approach as a fundamental step toward co-research and co-innovation were upshots that emerged from our analysis. The outcomes of this study can be used by competent national and the regional authorities to design their future research and innovation policies and interventions.

Systemic, multi-actor, user-centric approaches are increasingly used and promoted by innovation policies to meet complex societal challenges that, often, require socio-technical systems transitions...

The implementation of the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-Agri) has advanced a systemic approach to innovation in agriculture. This approach em...