key issues  LIyan and her students raised are:

Development and Diffusion of Farmer Innovation in China: Interaction between Informal and Formal Sectors

research assumptions:

1. interaction will fast the process of GRI R&D and diffusion;
2. The interaction between informal and formal sectors in promoting the development and diffusion of farmer innovation takes place not just as formal sector-driven but also informal sector-driven.
3. Farmer innovation provides substance to the formal innovation, vice versa.
4. interaction is not enough
5. GRI sometimes may hurt sustaible develment,  interaction sometimes may worse the situation

the research question 1-4 will be answered thorugh questionnaire, 5 will be answered thorugh case study

Research methodlogy:

1.base on the research quetsion, we design a questionnaire;
2. case study

notes:

1. 2000 farmer innovators’ stories(more than 3000 innovations). farmer innovators refer to those farmers when they started thier innitiatives of innovation: 1. no help from outside; 2. no higher education.

2. the team collect the detailed information thorugh net about one story, and fill in the questionnaire. we assume all the infomation on net is correct.

3. we limit informal sector only to farmer innovator who satisfied satrdards mentioned in note 1.
formal sector means: 1. government organization; 2. research institute; 3. companies.

4. government intervention is a kind of interaction;

5. the starting point of doing research on interavtion between formal and informal sector is from the beginning stage of innovation;

6. we only study the most direct, and important impact of interaction

we several times discussed the questionare and did the polit test, till now seems much better. will email you for comments once we confirm from the team.

a very important question arised by a student yesterday: shall we checked prof. anil gupta to confirm what till now we are doing is a correct way to go?  i feel it is very important. pls guide us.

thank you very much

liyan

comments of Dr Nitin Maurya, NIF and HBN team

Dear Prof Liyan

I must indeed congratulate you and your team for the initiative taken to
discuss papers based on GRI so as to grasp more theoretical
understanding on the topic. This is probably going to engage more
scholars in the field and further develop some of the already evolved
theoretical frameworks.

I am writing to you specifically in connection to the research paper you
have mentioned about. Please pardon me for mailing my unsolicited
suggestions. Kindly consider if you find them appropriate or ignore if
irrelevant.

1. Please pursue primary fieldwork wherever possible as internet
stories/articles cannot be assumed to be completely correct. This is
going to reduce drastically the sample size (presently 2000) but bring
out the richness and insight in cases, which otherwise may not be there
in the online published articles. The academic style of working is quite
different to the journalistic style of working.

2. If you are concentrating only on innovations from the informal sector
without any support from the formal sector (note number 1), you will not
be able to have concrete data to support your assumption number 1, which
is ‘interaction will fasten the process of GRI R&D and diffusion’. In
order to have data to support assumption number 1, it would be
inevitable to include cases from the informal sector that received
help/support from some end. I would suggest to separate cases in this
way a) Informal without any help b) informal with financial help but
without technical help c) informal without financial help but with
technical help d) informal with both financial help and technical help
at various stages of development.

3. The type of help (financial/technical), the type of organisation that
provides help (Government R&D or Private enterprise) and the point of
time in the development cycle of innovation when the help (if any) was
received by the innovator is also very important. A timely help may
further motivate an innovator or lack of it may discourage him. Profit
driven private sector companies (if interested) are, more often than
not, going to take an innovation faster than the governmental agencies.

4. The research assumptions may be reordered, and revised and the
question format may accordingly be prepared.

5. The place of data collection is as important as the type and quality
of data collected. This would give an insight into the though process of
an individual and possible source of his information retrieval. Also
adds value to idea/innovation given the background setting and brings
out the context. Let me give an example- a young girl in a remote
village of Bihar state of India gives an idea about a heater with a
buzzer and a LED that will continuously buzz and glow, respectively,
till the heater is on, to prevent accidental burning. This is of course
not a novel idea as such devices are available but interesting to note
is the fact that electricity supply is still tens of kilometers away
from her village. How did the girl know about heater and the problems
associated it?

Presently i can mention the above only. I would be happy to be part of
this learning exercise, if not unwelcome, and contribute. Please ignore
my mail if you dnt find my comments appropriate.

With regards,

Nitin

Dr. Nitin Maurya
Scouting and Documentation, NIF
____________________________________

Anil K Gupta