Learnings from delivering a trilateral climate‑smart agriculture innovation programme

Delivering innovation at scale in global agriculture requires more than funding. It needs carefully designed programmes, trusted delivery partners and the ability to connect innovators across borders, disciplines and markets. Drawing on experience from the Climate‑Smart Agriculture Partnership, this article reflects on lessons from designing and delivering a trilateral innovation programme spanning the UK, Brazil, Ghana and Nigeria.

Phase one of the Climate‑Smart Agriculture Partnership brought together organisations from the UK, Brazil, Ghana and Nigeria to collaboratively accelerate the development and testing of climate‑smart agricultural innovations.

Funded by UK International Development, through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and delivered by Innovate UK and Innovate UK Business Connect, the programme supported 17 trilateral Innovation Award projects, alongside Travel Grants and networking Scoping Projects. Together, these mechanisms enabled relationship‑building, knowledge exchange and early‑stage collaboration to mature into structured, delivery‑ready partnerships.

Innovate UK Business Connect played a central delivery role in this programme, bringing together diverse innovators for effective collaboration across three continents. This built on our experience of delivering bilateral international programmes but introduced new considerations around the programme design and delivery, and for the individual projects.

Over the past year, clear lessons emerged on what it takes to design and deliver effective trilateral innovation programmes. The following insights are beneficial to organisations considering running collaborative or trilateral innovation programmes in the future:

1. Trilateral partnerships add value when expertise is genuinely complementary 

The strongest projects were those that combined distinct but complementary strengths across the three geographies.

This combination went beyond simple bilateral collaboration. As well as delivering strong north-south collaboration, the programme simultaneously enabled South–South knowledge exchange, with Brazilian and African partners sharing experience across comparable agricultural and climatic contexts.

Learning for future programmes: Trilateral calls should be designed to incentivise genuine interdependence between partners, rather than parallel activity delivered in different countries.

2. A mix of business and research partners strengthens innovation outcomes

Across the portfolio, projects that combined businesses and research organisations were better able to balance technical rigour with commercial realism. Researchers supported the development and validation of novel approaches, while businesses kept a clear line of sight to market needs, routes to scale and future investment.

Learning for future programmes: Funding mechanisms should actively encourage balanced consortia, with space for both applied research and early market exploration.

3. Strong coordination and project management are critical

Delivering trilateral projects brings additional complexity. Partners reported challenges related to time zones, contracting, institutional processes and compressed delivery timelines. Where projects succeeded in navigating these issues, it was often due to clear leadership and robust project management.

Programme‑level support also mattered. Guidance on expectations, opportunities for peer learning, and structured touchpoints helped consortia to manage risk and stay focused on outcomes.

Learning for future programmes: Build in explicit support for coordination of large consortia, including realistic timelines, clear roles and early investment in partnership building.

4. Early relationship‑building pays off

Trust and relationship‑building is important, particularly where partners have not worked together before. Early-stage networking activities and travel grants helped to de‑risk later innovation projects by allowing partners to align on objectives and ways of working.

Learning for future programmes: Trilateral models benefit from a pipeline approach, with lighter‑touch activities that allow partnerships to form before larger innovation projects are initiated.

5. Collaborative programmes can identify solutions to challenging global problems by creating pathways into new markets

Collaborative innovation can contribute practical solutions to global challenges such as food security. By providing access to real‑world testing environments and international networks, the programme helped businesses with effective solutions to explore routes into new markets while generating early evidence to support future scale-up.

Learning for future programmes: Structures that allow the sharing of knowledge can speed up the development of new technologies. Position trilateral initiatives as part of a longer innovation journey, linking early‑stage R&D to follow‑on funding, investment and market entry support.

Designing future trilateral programmes

Overall, the Climate‑Smart Agriculture Partnership demonstrated that trilateral innovation models can deliver meaningful added value. Clear objectives, complementary expertise, strong coordination and early investment in relationships all proved critical to success.

Find out more

To discuss this programme, its projects, or potential future collaborations, please get in touch with our expert Joanna Scales.