Fostering Innovation for Sustainable Food Security: The Southern Africa Food Lab

Creating transformative spaces for dialogue and action: reflecting on the experience of the Southern Africa Food Lab

“…The Food Lab's theory of change pivots on the belief that transformational change in the food system can become possible by bringing together a microcosm of influential actors in that system, in a spirit of dialogue, to deepen their understanding and appreciation of aspects of the system and to generate a new and more collective understanding of the system and their role in it. In other words, the Food Lab seeks to generate triple-loop learning (McLachlan et al 2014). New relationships and new appreciation of the range of perspectives can create new ideas with new possibilities for change that were not visible or possible before.…”

“…We completed a detailed case study focused on our work with smallholder farmers in South Africa. Theory U guided the establishment of the Food Lab in 2010 in a year-long process organized around each of the three main phases (for descriptions and analyses of this process see McLachlan et al 2014 andBitzer et al 2015). Subsequent initiatives of the Food Lab again applied the U-process design, in effect giving rise to iterative cycles of going through the "U," in which the outcomes of one cycle inspired and informed subsequent cycles (as depicted by the green and dashed arrow in Figure 1).…”

The Evolution of a Sustainability Leader: The Development of Strategic and Boundary Spanning Organizational Innovation Capabilities in Woolworths

“…We thereby complement other contributions to this book, which approach such type of innovation from an entrepreneurial perspective focusing on small and even micro businesses (Littlewood and Holt 2015 ;Smith and Seawright 2015 ;Balkema and Romijn 2015 ) or from a relational perspective highlighting the multiple actors involved in innovation (McKague et al 2015 ;Moore 2015 ;McLachlan et al 2015 ;Kuenkel and Aitken 2015 ). While our chapter picks up elements reinforcing their different perspectives -for instance, the overlap of social and environmental innovation or the importance of stakeholder relations -we add insights on the distributed nature of innovation processes within an organization, the capabilities required to initiate and sustain such processes and the interfaces between internal initiatives and external stakeholders.…”

Learning Food Quality and Safety from Wireless Stickers

“…Indeed, scientists and governments have long recognized the need to assess food quality and safety. The vast majority of existing solutions, however, rely on expensive equipment in specialized food labs [7,22]. These solutions typically require extracting food samples to perform electro-chemical tests on them for determining bacteria content or impurities.…”