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Abstract
Agricultural development policies and programs, including extension and support
for innovation, implicitly assume that the whole target population has the ability to
innovate. Recent research in neuroscience, education, social sciences and psychology has
shown that innovative capabilities are distributed very unevenly. We explored the
distribution of innovative capabilities and the ability to integrate a technological package
in a sample of commercial lemon producers in Mexico. We have found that the ability to
explore new techniques is different from the ability to integrate an efficient production
and commercial package. The ability to explore follows an exponential distribution while
integration of the package follows a bimodal distribution. The ability to explore depends
on the farmer’s connection to a variety of information sources, but not to his/her ability to
integrate a technical package. Exploration is also not linked to education, age or credit
access. Integration of a production package, on the other hand, depends on more
traditional variables such as credit access. These findings have important implications for
the design of development programs, including extension and participatory research.