Agri-Tech startups and innovation coordination in developing countries: a Sectoral Innovation System analysis from South Africa

Agri-Tech startups are increasingly seen as important actors in agricultural transformation, yet their role within developing-country innovation systems remains poorly understood. Drawing on the Sectoral Innovation Systems framework and qualitative interviews with startups and other actors in South Africa, this paper investigates how Agri-Tech startups engage with and shape agricultural innovation systems under conditions of weak coordination and resource constraint. The findings show that innovation emerges through distributed learning, intermediary knowledge translation, partnership-based coordination, and context-specific adaptation rather than linear processes of technology development and diffusion. Agri-Tech startups contribute to technological change and to the validation, legitimacy, and coordination processes through which technologies become credible and usable in agricultural production. The paper contributes to innovation systems research by reframing Agri-Tech startups as system-configuring actors embedded in relational and institutional processes, and to agricultural innovation policy by highlighting the importance of supporting intermediary functions, system-level learning, and partnership formation.