JULY 2018 GERMINATION.CA 11 “The money was made by the person selling the seed, and that person often wasn’t around to take the heat if their product didn’t perform according to their claims.” The Canada Seeds Act was born not to stifle innova- tion, but to regulate new seed varieties to ensure they progressed in such a way as to have the most benefit for all involved, says DePauw. That process of steering the innovation ship through uncharted waters, so to speak, is an essential part of the innovation process, according to Shukla — albeit a coun- terintuitive one. “During the process of innovating, when you come upon obstacles in the path of your moving forward, you have to be able to recognize when things have become warped. The innovation process for GMOs, for example, was effectively perverted by the fact we didn’t respond to the objections being raised by people who knew noth- ing about the subject. There was little engagement by the developers of GM in helping challenge the misinforma- tion that was out there. Many seed companies have been affected the same way,” he says. “Despite the best efforts of people in the industry, it’s still a major issue. Innovation is multi-fanged.” That process, of course, includes both peer review and questions posed by society at large. The latter is often played out on social media, and countless voices vie for supremacy in what Shukla terms the “online battleground.” “For a seed researcher, for something to become truth it has to go through a [peer review] process that essentially attempts to destroy what you’ve created, because you have to try and disprove something in order to prove it,” he says. “That doesn’t apply to social media, where assertion becomes fact. It’s destructive in that it attempts to take down people who’ve dedicated their lives to understand- ing that everything is ambiguous until you can prove oth- erwise. Social media is a cascade of opinion that becomes truth in and of itself.” That makes public education an essential part of the innovation process, he adds. The seed industry must work hard to counter misinformation that proliferates in the online world. Navigating the Battleground That said, as the innovation process proves, new ideas can be found in the most unexpected of places. Bill Aimutis, global director of innovation for Cargill, says he often turns to social media and other online spheres to find out what’s new and hot in the technological world. “Social media circles are great for that. What podcasts are people listening to, what TV shows are they watching and does the host of that show mention certain technolo- gies? A good example is probiotics. They’ve been around for 35 to 40 years. It wasn’t until they were talked about on a popular U.S. talk show that those trends went from being a fad to a major trend,” he says. It’s also a good way to watch the innovation process play out from start to finish — from success to failure and back again. “Drone technology has been used by the military for 15 years, and then people began building their own toy drones. Agriculture finally started to look at drones and what they could build with them. Then you saw 30-40 companies pop up in the drone space. Not all of them were successful — some failed — but it’s because of their popularity in the online world and all those various chan- nels coming together.” The same story is playing out with regard to the high oleic soybean, notes Phil Kerr, president of SERIO Nutrition Solutions in Missouri. Kerr has worked in the life sciences for several decades and is the former senior director of discovery research and development for DuPont. He currently provides consulting services for the food sector. Kerr says the story of the high oleic soybean is a cautionary tale of how a new and innovative product can encounter obstacles that prevent an otherwise significant product from getting to market and helping the people it’s meant to. High oleic soybeans produce cooking oil that is very stable and does not require the need for hydrogenation, a process that produces unhealthy trans fat. Kerr notes that the high oleic soybean was ready to begin its commercial life almost two decades ago, but global regulatory hurdles and consumer backlash against GMOs prevented the product from being successful. Only now is the high oleic soybean beginning to see real success. “It’s one of the primary examples of how an innovative product offering huge consumer benefits has been slowed down dramatically. We have to think more comprehen- sively early on in the development of these technologies. There are gaps in knowledge and in the understanding of benefit and risk,” Kerr says. “That’s the lesson we have to learn — what are the implications of the seed we create and ultimately use to nourish production livestock or humans? We’re all living in a world where that transparency has to occur across that entire supply chain.” “THEREWASLITTLEENGAGEMENTBYTHE DEVELOPERSOFGMINHELPINGCHALLENGE THEMISINFORMATIONTHATWASOUTTHERE. MANYSEEDCOMPANIESHAVEBEENAFFECTED THESAMEWAY.” –RohitShukla