A Review of Digital Data Resources on Innovation and Impact

The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (RTB) has commissioned a study to develop
an innovation catalog to present its innovation portfolio to the international scientific and
development community and to support ongoing efforts to establish an innovation management
architecture in CGIAR. The study team has been tasked with designing an application model that can
inform the innovation and impact management architecture of CGIAR and test it within the RTB
innovation portfolio leading to an RTB Innovation Catalog that can be used as an example for future
work.
Guided by the recently finalized work methodology, the interdisciplinary research and technical team
members have reviewed existing digital resources, i.e. web portals and databases that present the
social innovations across multiple sectors such as agriculture, food, environment, health, and energy
to the international research-for-development and impact investment communities. This document
describes the methods and the findings of this review. It shows the profiles, features, and data
provided by the digital resources; compares and contrasts them by assessing their relevance,
effectiveness, efficiency, functionality, and formats. It shows that, although there are a few features
that most existing digital resourcesshare, i.e. being hosted by international organizations, having easy to-navigate interfaces, and providing limited filtering and search options, there are significant
differences between them. The digital resources focus on different subsets of innovation-related
information and provide different levels of granularity. The review concludes that to present its
innovations across the broad spectrum of digital resources, the RTB Program and CGIAR need to use
rich metadata sets with a few different interface and export options to be customized based on the
profile of individual, essential digital resources of interest.