In May, Dr Jo Wisdom and Tanya Kilminster represented the Grower Group Alliance (GGA) and the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub at the Collaborate Innovate Conference, hosted by Cooperative Research Australia at the UWA University Club in Perth.
Bringing together industry, research institutions, government and innovation-focused organisations, the conference offered a useful chance to step outside the day-to-day and hear how other sectors are approaching some of the same challenges we grapple with in agriculture: how to move good ideas into practice, how to build the right partnerships, and how to create impact that lasts beyond a single project.
For the Hub, it was also an opportunity to connect with people from Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs), CRC Projects, post-CRC entities, research hubs, rural Research and Development Corporations and other organisations working at the intersection of research, innovation and adoption. Across presentations, panel discussions and workshops, one message came through clearly: innovation doesn’t happen in isolation.
Five ideas that resonated with the Hub
While the conference covered a wide range of sectors and themes, several messages had strong relevance for the Future Drought Fund Drought Hubs Program and for agriculture more broadly.
Innovation in agriculture is about more than productivity. Productivity still matters, but resilience is increasingly part of the conversation.
A systems approach is essential. Problems generally cannot be solved by a single technology, project or organisation, and the adoption of new practices requires coordination between growers, researchers, government and industry.
- Considerations around adoption matters, and more consideration is required as to the operating systems farmers are working in, such as timing, regulation, finance, labour, skills, business models and risk tolerance.
- Technology alone rarely drives change in agriculture. Progress depends on trusted relationships, translation, extension, listening, brokering partnerships, facilitating conversations, synthesising evidence, building confidence and maintaining trust over time. More often than not, farmers trust peers, advisers and local relationships.
- Impact measurement in agriculture is starting to look more like strategy than reporting, and there is growing interest in understanding what changed, why it changed, what enabled or constrained uptake, and what pathways opened or closed. Impact measurement becomes a learning system, shifting from proving value to improving decisions.
Why this matters for the Hub
For the Hub, conferences like Collaborate Innovate are valuable not just because they showcase new ideas, but because they create space to test our own thinking against what’s happening in other sectors and regions.
Many of the themes discussed at Collaborate Innovate align closely with the Hub’s work: supporting adoption, connecting research with practice, building partnerships, and helping farming businesses and regional communities strengthen drought resilience over time. The conference also opened the door to new conversations and relationships, both within WA and nationally, that may support the Hub’s work well beyond this event.