Infinite Leadership and Market Intelligence in CGIAR Breeding

Matty Demont (IRRI), Berber Kramer (IFPRI), Robert Andrade (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT), Melanie Connor (IRRI), Nedumaran Swamikannu (ICRISAT), Sika Gbegbelegbe (IITA), Bert Lenaerts (IRRI), Ruvicyn Bayot (IRRI), and Vivian Polar (CIP)

Area of Work 1 on Market Intelligence, CGIAR Breeding for Tomorrow Science Program

Like many donation-dependent non-profits, CGIAR faces recurring budget fluctuations that force difficult trade-offs. Each funding cycle demands a careful recalibration of priorities—balancing urgent needs with long-term impact across global agricultural systems. This requires forward-looking leadership. Simon Sinek (2019) distinguishes between two types of leadership. Finite Leadership focuses on short-term goals, competition, and resource protection, with limited attention to inclusivity or equity. Success is measured by immediate wins—budgets, outputs, or market share—often at the expense of long-term relevance or collaboration. Infinite Leadership is driven by long-term vision, adaptability, and service to a just cause. Infinite leaders commit to nurturing internal capacities that foster gender equity, diversity, and inclusion, recognizing that diverse teams bring broader insight and innovation potential. They prioritize trust, resilience, and co-creation, recognizing that progress is ongoing, and success is shared across time and stakeholders. In the context of CGIAR breeding programs, adopting an infinite mindset means moving beyond short-term project cycles and release targets to sustain an innovation ecosystem that continuously learns, adapts, and delivers relevance across geographies and generations.

In a finite mindset, market intelligence is typically seen as a cost—an expense that competes with breeding budgets. But infinite leaders recognize that market intelligence is a strategic asset: it’s feeding the system. When guided by inclusion principles, market intelligence enables breeders to align not only with evolving consumer needs but also with diverse farmer realities, women, men, young people and indigenous communities who experience markets and innovation differently. It allows programs to anticipate shifts in demand, design products that resonate with farmers, processors, and consumers, and know how to position these in a way that helps overcome barriers to their use. This alignment doesn’t just improve adoption; it builds trust, relevance, and long-term viability. That’s the essence of infinite leadership: playing the long game, where the goal is not to win the budget cycle, but to advance a cause: food and nutrition security, resilience, and farmer prosperity. A manager may ask, “How do we protect our resources?” A leader with an infinite mindset asks, “How do we grow our impact and attract allies?” By investing in market intelligence, CGIAR breeding programs move from being supply-driven to demand-responsive. They become more fundable, more scalable, and more future-proof. That’s not a cost—it’s a commitment to staying in the game, serving the mission, and adapting to change.

Varietal turnover in many CGIAR breeding programs has slowed dramatically. Despite technical advances, too few varieties are being replaced, adopted, or scaled—reflecting not only a supply-driven orientation in breeding, but also the limited capacity of seed systems to deliver varieties that align with farmers’ evolving needs.

This disconnect ignores a fundamental truth: farmers are agents, not only recipients. They make choices based on market signals, cultural preferences, climate realities, livelihood goals, economic constraints, and behavioral biases. Designing breakthrough products, varieties that farmers want and need and not just tolerate requires a deep understanding of drivers of choice. These factors are further shaped by gender roles, access to resources, mobility, and decision-making power, all of which influence who adopts, who benefits and who is left behind. That’s where market intelligence comes in.

Market intelligence in CGIAR breeding is not just a service; it’s a process of co-creation. It brings together transdisciplinary product design teams of breeders, social scientists, nutritionists, gender and climate experts, and value chain stakeholders to collaboratively design products that reflect the lived realities and aspirations of farmers, processors, traders, and consumers. This framing reinforces the infinite mindset: breeding is not a solo act of innovation, but a transdisciplinary journey toward relevance, resilience, and impact.

Infinite leaders in breeding don’t just chase genetic gains. They pursue relevance, resilience, and regenerative impact. They ask: “What products will farmers and consumers still choose five or ten years from now, in a hotter, more volatile and urbanized world?” and “How will women, men, young people and indigenous communities participate in, influence and benefit from these choices?”

Breakthrough products are not just high-yielding, they are climate-resilient, nutrition-sensitive, culturally resonant, and economically viable. They are socially inclusive, designed with the specific needs, roles, and preferences of diverse user groups in mind. They solve real problems. And to design them, transdisciplinary product design teams need to know:

• What traits farmers value and why?
• What contextual constraints farmers face to using the varieties they value?
• How gender norms, intra-household decision-making, and access to assets affect adoption and use?
• What processors, retailers, traders, and consumers demand?
• How demand for industrial and non-food use will evolve in the future?
• How dietary change will shift future consumers’ demand?
• How climate change is reshaping production zones and risk profiles?
• Where the next adoption frontier lies?
• Who might be excluded from these frontiers and how inclusive pathways can be built?

This intelligence doesn’t come from the lab; it comes from observing, listening, mapping, and modeling. It’s not a cost; it’s an investment in the future.

Yes, farmers plant seeds – not market intelligence. But the traits they value (e.g., early maturity, drought tolerance, cooking quality, storability, taste, market value) are direct expressions of market intelligence. When breeders listen to farmers, processors, traders, and consumers, and translate that into trait prioritization, the resulting seed becomes a living embodiment of that intelligence. And if the new seed does not respond to farmers’ needs, they will not plant it and stick to their old proven varieties. So in a very real sense, farmers do grow market intelligence—the intelligence just happens to be embodied in the seed, take root, sprout, and yield grain.

When intelligence on demand, prices, and preferences is systematically integrated into breeding decisions, it not only improves varietal targeting but also strengthens the investment case for funders. Economic analyses show that even modest allocations to intelligence activities can enhance the internal rate of return of breeding portfolios by improving the extent and speed of adoption (Alston, Norton, & Pardey, 1998).

Without significant investment in market intelligence, breeding risks producing technically sound but socially irrelevant varieties. That’s a finite game: chasing short-term releases, protecting budgets, and hoping for uptake. Infinite mindset, by contrast, invests in strategic foresight. It sees market intelligence as a way to:

• Design with demand in mind
• De-risk innovation pipelines
• Promote gender-equitable and socially inclusive innovation outcomes
• Attract aligned investment
• Build trust with value chain actors and funders alike

Breakthrough products emerge when breeding is guided by a vision larger than the breeding cycle, one that honors the agency of farmers and consumers, anticipates climate disruption, values gender equality and social inclusion as intrinsic to innovation, and commits to long-term impact. That’s the infinite mindset CGIAR needs to embrace. Embedding this mindset institutionally requires continuous learning systems, and open feedback loops that keep breeding aligned with farmer realities and market evolution.