Reaching the Millennium Development Goals requires new and more effective solutions to the obstacles facing the rural poor - and coordinated, country-led action to put these solutions to work on a wide scale. Within the international system of development assistance, IFAD has historically been the only institution dedicated exclusively to rural poverty reduction globally, and it is looked to as a major source of new approaches in this area - for its own assistance operations, but also for the development assistance system as a whole. The purpose of the IFAD Initiative for Mainstreaming Innovation (IMI) is to strengthen the tools with which IFAD can play this expanded role - to increase the scope and quality of the replicable innovations explored and disseminated by IFAD and its partners to reduce rural poverty. The goal of this three-year initiative is to enhance IFAD's capacity to promote innovations that will have a positive impact on rural poverty. In its simplest form, innovation is a process that adds value or solves a problem in new ways. For IFAD, it is the development of improved and cost-effective ways to address problems and opportunities faced by the rural poor. In that context, the Fund"s role is that of a facilitator, mediator, enabler and promoter of innovation.

 For IFAD, "innovation" is a process that adds value or solves a problem in new ways. It is:

"the development of improved and cost-effective ways to address problems and opportunities faced by the rural poor through the projects and programmes it supports. These encompass institutional and technological approaches, as well as pro-poor policies and partnerships. IFAD directly supports innovation and, together with its partners, facilitates its processes and promotes its replication and scaling up."

Innovation is not pursued for its own sake, but for its potential to impact rural poverty reduction.

For IFAD, the most important innovations are those that

• change the way smallholders and other rural poor people invest, produce and market their products; manage their assets
• get organized, communicate and interact with their partners
• influence policies and institutions.

Thus the innovations that IFAD promotes on the ground can take many forms - institutional, procedural, methodological, administrative, political, social, technical and legal. Innovations are frequently needed in the way that agencies - governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research and finance institutions and private enterprises - support rural development and serve the rural poor so as to lift barriers and create new platforms for action for the poor.

IFAD's approach to mainstreaming innovation in its operations and culture is:

• people-centred
• integral to all operations and processes, not an isolated activity
• decentralized, field oriented, based on partnership and not "IFAD-centric"
• rapid, flexible and responsive to needs
• carefully monitored and evaluated in order to mitigate risks for poor people
• focused on learning and the sharing of knowledge

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