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Research organizations like CIAT with their every day broader agenda of multidisciplinary research need to become more adept at sharing their knowledge through collaborative learning processes.

Efforts to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration among research centers and partners have tended to focus on better management of information flows and on the capture of codified knowledge resulting from agricultural research. By doing so, these efforts focused on aspects related to information management rather than on knowledge sharing.

Though necessary and important, these activities are not sufficient for helping scientists deal with the complex challenges of sustainable agricultural development.

In search of more effective approaches, CIAT coordinated a new collaborative initiative to create opportunities for CGIAR center management and staff to experiment with knowledge sharing approaches and thus demonstrate the value of those approaches as means of facilitating organizational change and research collaboration.

Funded by the World Bank through the CGIAR's ICT-KM Program, the Knowledge Sharing or KS Project adopted a practical approach building on previous efforts to enhance KS in the CGIAR centers.

Since then CIAT has gained expertise in several knowledge sharing-related areas, like facilitation (including on-line facilitation), participatory decision-making, and the use of knowledge sharing approaches and tools (see KS toolbox) that allow staff and their partners to discover and experiment with new ways to establish collegial relationships and foster more creative scientific collaboration.

Most recently, CIAT, through the ICT-KM Program, supported the CGIAR with the implementation of its Civil Society Organizations (CSO) engagement strategy. Using knowledge sharing tools and methods, various events have been organized in connection with the CGIAR Annual General Meeting 2006 (AGM06). These events—the Virtual Conversation, Innovation Marketplace and CSO-CGIAR Forum—gave rise to a constructive dialogue among CGIAR stakeholders.

During 2007 and 2008, CIAT and IWMI are coordinating the second phase of the KS project. While IWMI is identifying and pursuing opportunities to enhance collaborative learning and innovation in CGIAR research activities and projects (KS in research), CIAT is supporting knowledge sharing at the System level, mainstream KS in other Centers, and foster further development of the community of KS practitioners (institutional KS).

Those actions should go a long way toward making Centers more efficient in planning, conducting and evaluating their work, as well as improve the effectiveness of selected research projects in delivering research results and development outcomes.