This initiative aims at mobilizing skills and expertise of several European Universities to set up an inter-institutional and multidisciplinary programme of research and capacity building, at the Euro-pean level, on the topic: "".
 
The general objective of all the proposed research programmes will be to enlighten the conditions for technical innovation in smallholding tropical agriculture, under conditions of high collective constraints. The guiding issues of inquiry are to explain where, why and when sustainable innova-tions may appear in these conditions, then how they extend, and finally how to multiply and scale up such innovations. For such a topic, there is a need to integrate across disciplines, across scales, across stakeholders, and across components, and each single European institution is too small or too partially disciplinary oriented to stand alone in the international scientific debate. 

This initiative is also part of a more general Natura-led initiative to organise networks between PhD students (and young post-docs) at the EU level and to open this network to the participation of young professionals and researchers from southern Universities and research centres. 

Initiating the network at Tropentag 2007 

• Research teams interested to participate will be invited for a launching workshop which will be held as a side event of the Tropentag 2007 (Witzenhausen, Germany) on October 10, 2007.
• The launching workshop will be a closed meeting. Participation will reserved to invited par-ticipants that have expressed their will to join the network. Candidates can be individual or formal research teams with a convincing experience on the topic defined above. They will be required to send evidence of their experience 
• For the logistic details on how to get to Witsenhausen, please consult the Tropentag website (http://www.tropentag.de/)