IMOD: Innovate. Grow. Prosper. - William Dar, ICRISAT
Frank A. Hilario
January 25, 2011
Dear Colleagues,
A very warm welcome to all of you. It is inspiring to me to see all the energy, experience and expertise in this auditorium today.
To me, and I hope to you, this Annual Research Meeting is very special. We have the chance here to renew and reinvigorate ICRISAT in a major way, capitalizing on the intensive strategic deliberations that we all participated in over the past year. We´ve also raised the expectations of our stakeholders who participated on a broad scale.
Now is the time to implement our new strategy. We have to walk the talk. We must get this right.
Our strategy, as you know is about harnessing markets to achieve our four Mission goals: to elevate the poor out of poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation across the dry tropics of the developing world. We call this strategy IMOD for short, that is, Inclusive Market-Oriented Development. We also summarize it in three simple words:
Innovate. Grow. Prosper.
Our role as a research-for-development institution is to Innovate. Better and more diverse crops and crop products, better, more resilient and productive cropping systems, and better policies and partnerships are the kinds of innovations that we have promised to the world. But we cannot develop these in a fragmented way. They have to be part of a unified strategy. The strategy that links them together is IMOD.
The word ´Grow´ signals that our innovations contribute by helping the poor to grow into new and more productive agricultural livelihoods. ´Grow´ is a dynamic word. It reflects change from one state to another in steady progress over time. Here we mean that, we do not work simply to ease the pain of the poor. We do not accept poverty as an eternal state.
We want change. We work to help them get out of poverty. In IMOD we are saying that we will help the poor move steadily along a path from subsistence farming, to market-oriented farming. So we will look at development differently than we did in the past – we will look at it from the perspective of dynamic change.
To deliver on this promise, we must understand deeply how to enable and motivate this kind of growth. We must consider that all too often, the true poor are left out because they lack the resources and empowerment to change by adopting high technology. They are left behind.
Our approach must be deliberately inclusive of those who need us most. Women and children particularly suffer from poverty, hunger and malnutrition in the tropical drylands. This is especially tragic, because they form the future of the drylands.
They cannot be left behind. IMOD without the "I" would be a hollow victory. We must help the truly poor to participate. And we must not forget the risks. We must ensure that change is accompanied by safety nets and resilience strategies.
If we get it right, our contributions will help the poor to succeed in moving along the IMOD pathway leading to Prosperity.
Prosperous families are no longer hungry and malnourished. They have the skills, the tools, the relationships to markets, and the safety nets that enable them to sustain resilient farms and livelihoods. When the poor achieve this, enabled by ICRISAT and many others, the world will judge that we have done our job right, and have done our job well. We will be strongly appreciated, and the world will support us to expand our impacts further.
Since IMOD is a dynamic strategy of progression from subsistence to market-oriented livelihoods, I think we all realize that we must develop our innovations with a systems perspective in mind. A systems perspective looks at how innovations fit together to make a functioning whole.
To define our systems, we must first identify the targets that we want to reach. By that I mean, we must identify those impacts and outcomes that we believe will deliver the highest payoff towards our Mission goals.
The connection to our Mission is very important. We may be tempted to work on certain topics out of intellectual curiosity, or impact outside of our Mission context, but since we are an applied science organization, our curiosity needs to lead to impacts that we have embraced in our Mission.
Once we´ve defined those top priority impacts and outcomes, we will be able to clearly describe the systems needed to deliver those. We will also be able to identify the constraints and bottlenecks to that delivery. This is where we must innovate solutions.
Not us alone, but us working with partners who will contribute innovations that lie outside our own expertise. So the systems perspective leads us to identify the partners that we need to achieve our highest priorities. In this way our strategy leads us naturally to identify Partnerships with Purpose.
Our partnerships with purpose strategy also helps us to focus. We do not build partnerships just for the sake of boasting that we have hundreds of partners. We build partnerships only as needed to better achieve clearly defined priorities leading to our Mission goals. Purposeful capacity-building follows the same logic.
Taken together, all these aspects of IMOD represent a real change in business as usual. In the past, we mainly looked to our own areas of disciplinary training, developed the best innovations that we could… but then left it to others to figure out how to put these diverse innovations together into an overall package that delivered prosperity for the poor. Too often, it just didn´t happen. We underestimated the challenge of moving from innovations to better-functioning systems in the real world.
Having learned this, we are now committing to broaden and deepen our approach. We will work in teamwork and partnership to understand how the parts fit together into a working whole. We will have a clear idea from the start of how our priority systems work, what obstacles and opportunities we and others will tackle, what we will achieve by when, and how we will fit all the pieces together and share them with the poor.
Its like building an engine – the engine of development will only move if the parts are designed to work with each other, and placed into a real vehicle connected to real wheels that are ready to roll.
Colleagues, I hope these introductory comments have helped to convey to you the importance of our task here, and the great opportunity that we have in front of us. Let us show once again the great team spirit that we all felt as we put our heads together in strategic planning last year. We came up with a rich new IMOD strategy and many exciting ideas.
We agreed to think creatively and innovatively, to be open to change, to take risks, to get out of our comfort zones, to build our capacities and partnerships, and not to just do business as usual. We committed to stronger teamwork, to a systems perspective, and to cultural change towards a learning organization.
Now is the time to show that we meant what we said. Now is the time to walk that talk. Now is the time to reinvigorate the ICRISAT that we all love. The ICRISAT that is the world´s best and most precious institution for applying research to help end poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the tropical drylands.
The whole world cares about our Mission as much as we do, and counts on us to deliver on our promise. We are all servants here, and it is our privilege to serve this great Mission on behalf of the world.
Will Team ICRISAT deliver? I believe Team ICRISAT will, because I know all of you. I know how strongly you share these beliefs.
Thank you, and I wish all of us the very best of success.
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