Orchestrating Diversity: Aligning Organisations to Support Social Innovation for Sustainable Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa

Well-organized ecosystems for innovation support services are crucial to accelerate agricultural innovations and to address the Grand Challenges to achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Deepening our understanding of what drives the emergence of service ecosystems is crucial to facilitate their deployment. In this study, we use the service ecosystems framework and focus on organizational alignment dynamics and ecosystem emergence. We provide an integrated perspective on how agricultural innovation support services are deployed through evolving coordination and institutional arrangements. Considering the specificities of agricultural innovation, we also provide new insights into the role played by hub organisations in their emergence by overcoming the constraints to organizational alignment for value co-creation. Our case study approach is based on semi-structured interviews and analysis of over 5 years of case study data concerning innovative labelling of organic farm products in sub-Saharan Africa. Participatory guarantee systems offer small-scale farmers the opportunity for organic or agroecological certification for national markets. This systemic innovation requires diverse technical, social, and organizational innovations and calls for several innovation support services. Processual analysis through temporal bracketing identified three stages of emergence: preliminary, birth, and growth. We differentiate between constraining factors, which are internal to the ecosystem and its functioning, and external factors, which depend on the context. We also enrich the theory of alignment and its relevance in the Global South in the form of two new constraining factors to alignment: international development projects and end-user demand, and the crucial role of hub organisations.