Agricultural advisory services play a major role in supporting innovation processes, particularly in developing countries. However, innovation support requires a variety of forms of support, called innovation support services (ISS). Based on an exploratory analysis in Madagascar, this article examines the role of agricultural advisory services in relation to the diversity of organizations and activities to support innovation. We interviewed the main organizations acting as providers of ISS in four geographic regions of the Highlands of Madagascar and we characterized their ISS offer. Results show that the technical advice service remains the most common type of ISS offered, with a high degree of pluralism among the providers of advice and a diversity of combinations with other ISS. However, innovators need to benefit from other ISS, such as capacity building, networking, institutional support and access to finance, inputs and equipment necessary for innovation. These results call for a renewal of the postures of the agricultural advisors towards more support oriented toward capacity building. They question the strategy of the organizations with regard to their support for innovation: a specialization in advisory service, a combination with other ISS or a collaboration with other organizations. Those results renew insights into the pluralism of the offer of advisory services. When analyzed through the prism of ISS, those services are not only applied at the level of the advisor or the advisory organization, but also at the level of the supporting network, which may exhibit various configurations. Perspectives call for a better coordination of advisory systems with the other service providers in order to ensure greater efficiency in supporting innovators.

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