Ketzel Levine blogs at NPR’s Talking Plants and she had a piece on Morning Edition on NPR today. Levine talked about a small, but intrepid woman, Rosario Costa Cabral, who has learned to regrow Amazonian forests that had been rendered bereft by indiscriminate logging and abandoned. But this little farmer does more than regrow forests. Levine writes

In addition to collecting and replanting seedlings of the few old-growth trees that had, miraculously, escaped logging, this fifty-something woman is known among her peers for her uncanny ability to grow crops that should not tolerate river flooding even once, let alone twice a day.

As Levine describes the rich papayas, the cacao, the hot chilli peppers, one wonders how Rosario is able to grow these in an area that sees the land submerged every so often under several feet of flood waters from the river. There are some good lessons that this path-breaking (I use the term both literally and metaphorically) woman teaches us about innovation:

1. Create a community by providing something that is essential, and give that stuff away for free

Rosario started not by growing some exotic plant, but by planting a staple food: cassava, whose edible roots are a rich source of carbohydrates in the tropical areas. The cassava she grew produced huge roots and became a local attaction. People asked for seeds, and she gave them to everybody for free. (Think Google, search engine, and free).

2. Experiment and observe over several years before you bring an innovation to market

The cassava grew such big roots because Rosario had handpicked the seeds from certain cassava that had shown tremendous resilience over many years to environmental changes.

3. Learn to time your innovation

Rosario picked a “magic month” to plant her cassava: November. That is the month when the tides from the flood are at their lowest level, and this gave the cassava time to acclimatize before the tides rose in later months. In innovation, timing is all.

4. Watch the markets carefully to spot strengths and weaknesses and contextualize innovation accordingly

Before she planted her cassava, Rosario watched the land carefully to see where the flood waters went and how deep the waters ran. Then she experimented to learn how much flooding each plant-type could tolerate. She found that cassava could tolerate up to 2 feet of flooding, lemon trees up to 4 feet, and chilli peppers up to 1.5 feet. She planted her forest garden according to this tolerance. Contextualize innovation (more on “contexts of innovation” in an article that will be available on Vivekin Group’s website later in February.)