Disentangling the Keys for Successful Sustainable Innovation in Rural Territories of Latin America

Innovation is a paramount force of competitiveness, but it’s also a major transformative force for society. For social sciences, innovations are novelties with transformative capabilities that go beyond a single stakeholder; they could be organizational, technological, technical, or any other. This implies a broad transformative potential, from the classic effects on competitiveness to social structure changes and, of course, sustainable transitions. Innovations are important for advanced economies and big firms, as they need to improve to keep their competitive advantages, but they’re even more important for developing economies and small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs trying to improve their results. The aim of this paper is to analyze what’s driving and empowering successful sustainable and inclusive innovations for rural stakeholders in Latin America. For this, the paper analyzes 18 cases selected by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, the Regional Fund for Agricultural Technology, and the Inter-American Development Bank as successful experiences and others from secondary and primary data. Finding that innovations offer many stakeholders chances to join competitiveness and sustainability goals by implementing cleaner technologies, designing sustainable productive systems, improving their products, and accessing niche markets with price premiums. At the same time, our findings show the success of these transformations is determined by the interaction of different actors–local, national, and international. There is also a major impact of alternative organizational forms with local embeddedness in promoting innovations, like cooperatives and associations, that lead or start the transformations.