Developing countries' agriculture today faces many challenges (rising poverty of farmers, food insecurity, climate change, etc.) that make agroecological innovations necessary (Tibi et al., 2022; Loconto, 2023; Matt, 2023). Once those innovations are created, there is at first a need for them to be used and, second, to be anchored in the national context. Third, there is a need for those innovations to evolve and expand in all the contexts in which they could be useful, integrating the adjustments due to implementation by their adopters. Those different steps do not occur in a straightforward way and sometimes require interventions from policy (Godin, 2017; Faure et al., 2018; Köhler et al., 2019). In Central and West Africa, the banana plantain is a priority food source (Bakouétila et al., 2016). In Cameroon, the banana plantain is not only cultivated as a single culture but it is also associated with various intercropping systems with annual and perennial crops such as coffee, cocoa, palm trees, and tubers (Dépigny et al., 2019). It helps to provide an income source for farmers and to shade annual crops during their early years. Cameroon is thus the 4th largest plantain producer in Central and West Africa (FAOSTAT, 2022). Production has increased exponentially by 450% between 1961 and 2020. Most of the increase in production was achieved by exploiting newly created areas through progressive deforestation from 1961 to 1993. Between 1985 and 1993, a regional agricultural research program developed a technological innovation for plantain propagation: plants from stem fragments (“PIF”) (Kwa, Temple, 2019). This technique increases the yield of plantain material a hundred fold compared to traditional methods and is simple and frugal compared to in vitro propagation (Sadom et al., 2010). It rapidly spreads beyond the frontier of Central Africa to West Africa, Latin America, the West Indies, and the Caribbean. It meets the demand of small producers and nurserymen to redu