Principles and tools

The ImpresS ex ante approach relies on three main principles: the focus on the generation of outcomes, on long term processes and on building a shared vision on the hypothetical impact narrative among partners. Three main tools are used: the innovation story, the outcome mapping and the impact pathway.

PRINCIPLES

The ImpresS ex ante approach is a participatory, iterative and adaptive process, that better takes into account the impact when constructing a research intervention, (the intervention can be a research or development project or cluster of projects). It aims at formulating hypothesis about impact pathways. This approach focuses on the actors that are protagonists of an innovation process and puts them at the centre of the construction of plausible impact pathways. This construction ideally includes all partners that will be involved in an intervention, supports them to identify the desired and most convincing impact pathway that the innovation process should follow. It makes explicit the underlying logic of how things will happen and with whom, and the most plausible hypotheses on which the intervention is going to act. It also aims at building interventions that are capable to learn during their implementation and take informed steering actions when necessary.

The ImpresS ex ante approach relies on three main principles:

  1. The crucial step in the impact pathway is the generation of outcomes. Outcomes stem from actors’ appropriation (use, adoption, transformation, adaptation) of the intervention outputs. This ex ante approach is focused on identifying “outcome generating processes” early in project design;
  2. Impact generation being a long time process, the impact pathway should take into account complementary past, present, future projects participating in a common innovation trajectory;
  3. The approach enables the formulation of a common vision based on a hypothetical impact narrative shared among partners.

During the implementation of an intervention, adjustments and adaptations to the initial impact pathway identified might occur. ImpresS ex ante includes the definition of a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system focused on outcomes that will enable strategic management and understanding of outcome generating processes.

TOOLS

The ImpresS ex ante approach relies, among others, on three main tools:

The innovation narrative

Innovations, their outcomes and their impacts, are not the result of a linear process. Research actions at CIRAD are conducted in close partnership with stakeholders, academics and non-academics from diverse contexts. Hence, in order to implement successful interventions, it is fundamental to explore and discuss among the partners, during project design and planning, what is the plausible innovation narrative that the intervention will unfold. This innovation narrative is built on an initial diagnosis, a participatory problems analysis, an actors and power mapping, the identification of project clusters, and plausible impact hypotheses on the innovation trajectory, in which research can play different roles (transfer, co-design, support, open innovation).

The outcome mapping

The ImpresS ex ante approach is actor-focused. It defines outcomes as actor’s appropriation of outputs of an intervention, leading to new practices (in agriculture or management), new organizations, new rules. They lead therefore to changes in practices or behaviors of actors who interact directly or indirectly with the intervention’s outputs.

Through the « Outcome mapping » phase, partners that have been involved in the intervention identify the desired outcomes, the role of different stakeholders in generating those outcomes, and the major changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills and so on, that are desirable to achieve changes in practices and behaviors. In order to incentivize the generation of outcomes, the mapping involves identifying the potential obstacles to these desired changes, and the strategies that the intervention can realistically devise to overcome them.

During outcome mapping, a specific attention is given to those outcome-generating processes that involve public policy and capacity strengthening of different actors, including research.

The impact pathway

After building the narrative and mapping the outcomes, an impact pathway of the future intervention is drafted to illustrate the plausible outcomes and impact hypotheses. The impact pathway is a tool grounded on the theory-driven evaluation literature (Douthwaite, 2003). This diagram represents the causal process of the intervention under study and includes:

  • inputs: the resources used by the research team to produce scientific results and products;
  • outputs: the output is generated by research activities or by the interactions of research activities with stakeholders in the projects. The output can be knowledge, scientific or not (publications, reports, database, methods …), trainings (academic or technical), expertise, technology, network, or other forms of production. The outputs can contribute to initiate the innovation process when they are appropriated by actors. In the ImpresS approach, research outputs (knowledge, prototypes …) elaborated before the intervention will be considered as inputs, whereas those elaborated during the intervention will be considered as outputs;
  • outcomes: the appropriation of results (outputs) by actors interacting directly or indirectly with research, which leads to new practices (agricultural or managerial), new organizations, new rules;
  • primary impacts: primary impacts are measured on actors interacting directly or indirectly with research and/or major actors of the innovation process, and can be evaluated with those actors;
  • secondary impacts: scaling out or scaling up of this innovation to other territories and audiences and its impact.

The impact pathway represents and makes explicit the causal links between its various elements (see below an illustration of an ImpresS impact pathway diagram).