[For a course entitled Technology & Social Justice I had to put together a brief presentation on agricultural innovation. I decided to use the lens of Eric von Hippel's user-innovation theory to examine farmer innovation in developing countries. For a similar riff, check out Ethan Zuckerman on innovating from constraint and the fantastic AfriGadget blog.]

Introduction

In the early 1970s, if you happened to be hiking in the woods around Marin County, you might have witnessed a rather strange sight: on the paths traditionally trod by horses or backpackers, an increasing number of outdoor enthusiasts were careening down the hills on bicycles. At the time, what we know as mountain biking was unheard of – bicycles were ridden exclusively on properly paved roads and sidewalks. The modern distinction between “road bike” and “mountain bike” quite simply did not exist. Why would it if no one wanted to pedal up and down rock-strewn dirt paths?

But, sure enough, some people did think this breakneck activity was a good idea. Unfortunately, their bicycles were incapable of handling the tumultuous rides on which the daredevils took them. So, with remarkable ingenuity, the bikers began modifying their bikes – tougher rubber for the wheels, motorcycle-style braking mechanisms – and soon enough, they started selling these “clunkers” to less mechanically inclined experimenters. Today, the mountain bike market in the U.S. is worth nearly $4 billion.[i]

The experience of mountain biking is not unique – in the past twenty years, researchers have documented a wide range of industries that experience what MIT Professor Eric von Hippel calls “user innovation.” These range from semiconductors to software to windsurfing. The proliferation of inexpensive digital communication and prototyping methods is only adding to the amount of user innovation. According to von Hippel, this form of innovation is an important source of novel product concepts and, in turn, economic growth, but do the insights of user innovation theory apply to the experience of poor farmers in the developing world?

Lead Users

Not everyone is an innovator. Not everyone who rides bicycles off-road takes the time to modify their road bike. Sometimes people will only try a new product if they receive it from a business. Those that do innovate, however, are called “lead users” and, as von Hippel explains, they exhibit two main characteristics, regardless of their specific innovations:

• Lead users “are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend…”
• And “they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there.”[ii]

Lead users, who do form a substantial portion of all users, are generally driven to innovate due to the homogeneity of mass-market products; that is, they have unmet needs due to unique circumstances or desires. For various reasons, it is difficult for firms to meet all the needs of their customers. Economies of scale favor “one size fits all” manufacturing. Information can be “sticky” meaning that transferring the specific context of use from users, where it is generated, to firms, can be expensive. “As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have” so they can better tailor their products to their needs by, say, adding tougher rubber or better brakes.[iii]

The fact that these innovators are not profit-seeking firms has some important implications. Most curiously to economists is the practice of freely sharing these innovations. If mountain biking is now a multi-billion dollar industry, the innovations made by those early enthusiasts surely had economic value. So why did they not capture it? Why do open source software programmers freely distribute their code? It turns out, capturing the rents from innovation is not always straight-forward or desired – registering intellectual property can be confusing and expensive and, in many cases, the reputational improvements that come from sharing the process behind your sturdier bicycle with your community is “payment” enough for passionate individuals.[iv]

Democratizing Farmer Innovation?

At first glance, innovations in software, mountain biking, and semiconductors seem like a far call from what is needed to help the poor farmers who constitute sizable portions of the population in developing countries; but might the user innovation theory provide an advantageous frame for innovation by farmers? Can innovative farmers be seen as lead users? And what are the implications of doing so? To begin to answer these questions, consider the story of Namwaya Sawadogo.

Namwaya, from Burkina Faso, provides for twenty family members, and through various innovations, he has moved from a small itinerant trader to a stable, relatively wealthy farmer. Through low-tech changes to his farm, such as constructing stone bunds and expanding into biologically diverse eucalyptus farming, Namwaya has become widely recognized in Burkina Faso as an innovator, even receiving visits from ranking officials.[v]

In many ways, Namwaya fits the archetype of a lead user – his innovations were motivated by the most fundamental of concerns, live or death, and he substantially benefited personally from them. In a survey of the motivations for farmer innovation, this is confirmed with food security toping the list while less essential goals, such as “better taste” correspond to less than one percent of the respondents.[vi] Furthermore, Namwaya was in front of market trends by creating innovations, such as conserving biodiversity, which would, in time, become larger movements.

Namwaya and other farmer innovators in developing countries are the victims of the same systemic market shortcomings that required mountain bikers to innovate. These market failures, such as the lack of appropriate technologies with regard to cost and durability, arise for numerous reasons in the developing world. In chronicling the trouble with traditional agriculture technology transfer, the authors of Farmer Innovation in Africa note that,

“[M]any of the technologies generated and promoted [through technology transfer] are too expensive for the hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers who cannot afford to invest in the packages of required inputs, such as introduced seed, fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, these packages are often standardized and promoted countrywide without regard to agroecological differences and poorly suited to the diverse and variable conditions of small holders in semi-arid and other marginal areas.”[vii] [Emphasis added.]

The cultural differences are important, too, especially with regard to women innovators. For example, although women often carry much of the farm burden, their innovative ideas often need to pass the approval of the husband who heads the family. Innovations that come from the bottom-up, through a user-innovator, are almost always low cost and more acceptable to the local conditions. The same difficulties firms have in the developed world – sticky information, economies of scale – are present and could even be exacerbated if firms do not believe that there is a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Von Hippel’s theory, though, does not map perfectly to farmer innovation in the developing world. In many ways it is overly general, especially given what we know about the nature of farmer innovators. They often exhibit a number of characteristics:

• Innovators have often been exposed to other areas through time in other parts of the country or world;
• Innovators tend to be relatively rich, giving them opportunity to experiment;
• Innovators are mostly middle-aged full-time farmers who have the experience necessarily to finely tune their farm systems;
• Innovators have strong personalities, but do not require formal education.[viii]

Moreover, although recent advances in information and communication technologies have greatly altered the communicative capabilities of poor farmers, illiteracy, scarce free time and the lack of broad communities of innovation in the developing world could limit the ability to disseminate user innovations.

Policy Implications

Given these strengths and weaknesses of von Hippel’s theory with regard to farmer innovation, what should those seeking to promote the livelihoods of poor farmers do? One of the most pressing concerns is to align intellectual property rights with their goal of promoting innovation. The growth of biotechnology has increasingly sidelined farmers who “have always been responsible for seed-innovation by selectively saving, planting and breeding seeds.” The patented nature of new seeds limits the flexibility of farmers who now need “permission to innovate.”[ix] Von Hippel has argued that countries without a long history of innovation policies biased towards large firms (i.e. developing countries) are better positioned to adapt to the user-innovator paradigm, but given the bargaining power of large firms compared to small farmers, there is still plenty to fear.[x]

Smaller steps are also possible: educational grants could increase exposure to other areas, better policing could reduce fears about physical theft of innovative products, and subsidies and information-sharing networks could promote the diffusion of ideas.

No theory is perfect or all-powerful, but ones with explanatory power can provide useful framing to real-world phenomena. Eric von Hippel’s user innovation model provides much of that explanatory power to farmer innovation in poor countries while still leaving room for local adaptation.

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[i] Lüthje, C., Herstatt, C., & von Hippel, E. (2005). User-innovators and “local” information: The case of mountain biking. Research Policy, 34(6), 951-965. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2005.05.005

[ii] Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT, 2005. Print.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] von Hippel, E. (2007). Horizontal innovation networks–by and for users. Industrial and Corporate Change. doi: 10.1093/icc/dtm005

[v] Reij, Chris, and Ann Waters-Bayer, eds. Farmer Innovation in Africa: A Source of Inspiration for Agricultural Development. Minneapolis: Earthscan Publications, 2001. Print.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Braun, Viktor, and Cornelius Herstatt. “Barriers to User-Innovation: The Paradigm of “Permission to Innovate”" ICMIT (2006). Print.

[x] von Hippel, E., & Jin, C. (2009). The major shift towards user-centered innovation: Implications for China’s innovation policymaking. Journal of Knowledge-based Innovation in China, 1(1), 16-27.