LUANAR and Michigan state university partnership is thru the Global Centre for Food Systems Innovations (GCFSI) the frugal innovation Practicum.
Frugal Innovation Practicum (MSU & LUANAR)
Frugal innovation is drawn from Anil Gupta’s work to the develop technologies, organizational forms, and business models by and for people who generally have minimal access to productive resources. This is a five-week practicum in urban food systems, based at the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), and collaboratively conducted by faculty from MSU and LUANAR. In addition, in contrast to the more prevalent top-down models of innovation development, frugal innovation typically proceeds in an inclusive manner ‘from the ground up,’ and is primarily focused on solving constraints of the poor through the organization and application of readily available resources and knowledge...
Global Centre for Food Systems Innovations (GCFSI)
The Global Center for Food Systems Innovation (GCFSI) is a USAID Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) development lab located at Michigan State University (MSU). GCFSI is a consortium led by MSU and includes other institutions such as The Energy and Resources Institute of India (TERI); Wageningen University in The Netherlands; Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, among others. The overall mission of the Center is to seek science, technology and engineering based innovative solutions to challenges to global food systems as impacted by global megatrends such as climate change, population growth, and workforce and skills development to address the challenges of rapid urbanization and resulting pressure on natural resources such as land and water resources. GCFSI aims to support the HESN by building a network of problem thinkers who can propose, develop, implement and monitor solutions that will address the key problems identified along each of the megatrends, with added components of the five cross-cutting themes. The goal of GCFSI is to create, test and enable the scaling of effective solutions and evidence-based approaches to a defined set of future critical global trend impacting food systems...
