Download Innovation and Development: Towards an Agenda

Innovation and Development:
Towards an Agenda
Presented by:
Prof. Gillian Marcelle
Wits Business School
25 February 2010
Common wisdom
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Innovation defined as the production, diffusion and use of new and economically
useful knowledge
Innovation strategies matter for development.
Innovation has been shown to be the foundation for enhanced competitiveness,
industrial and technological upgrading and a factor stimulating structural change
Strategies used in the developing world involve capability building and
technological upgrading for which learning processes are critical inputs
Innovation strategies help with structural changes, responsiveness to external
challenges, such as the changing nature of international markets and trade
regimes
Innovation can provide solutions for the effective provision of essential public
goods, such as education, housing and health.
Innovation can assist with the effort to balance common goals of producing
economic growth & redistribution of wealth
Intellectual Context
• Innovation studies community is undergoing reflective review of its
contribution to knowledge and impact (SPRU 40th anniversary, STEPS
progamme (Morlachi and Martin 2009).
•In parallel, development studies empahsising a more humane
development agenda (Emmerij 2006).
•Within development, contestation between advocates of a
developmental state and proponents of private-sector led models.
• Disconnect between innovation and entrepreneurship has been
recognized as a challenge for development (Lazonick 2008).
Points of Entry
Venues of engagement, such as organizing academic conferences. In February
2010, Wits University organized an international symposium that aimed to
explicitly connect the innovation studies agenda to development debates and to
offer the specific context of Africa and South Africa as an empirical laboratory for
investigating aspects of innovation studies practice at national and regional
levels.
The symposium aimed to provide a platform for knowledge exchange among
academics, policy makers and the business community on the interaction
among:
1. science, technology and innovation activities (‘practice’)
2. public policies to support and enhance innovation activities (‘policy’)
3. the efforts of the academic innovation studies community to study research
and innovation practice and policy and to mediate between them (‘research’) and
as a cross-cutting theme
4. the relevance and impact of innovation on development (“development’)
What is required?
Senior decision makers curious enough to take a risks on an interdisciplinary
venture of this type.
Disciplinary boundaries are hard-wired and coded. It is difficult to engage across
disciplines where the language and modes of knowledge production are very
varied. Starting assumptions can begin with mistrust and an absence of shared
understanding or a belief in a shared outcome. Definitions of success vary
across disciplinary boundaries.
The type of networking ability and systems thinking that is required at national
level to have a coherent innovation eco-system is also required within higher
education.
Constraints and Challenges
We are still at the proof of concept stage where the benefits of collaboration and
the strategies of cooperation and competition are very rudimentary.
The proponents of new ways of engagement will have to gain legitimacy in the
international and local knowledge production networks that already exist.
Communities of practice are built around strong trust relationships and these
require many years of gestation and move though phases.
In this field points of reference include work of the UN Millennium Project,
research from the Globelics network and research programmes of SPRU, the
Open University, UNU-MERIT and UN-WIDER to name a few.
Achieving a new agenda will require engagement with private sector firms,
institutions, individuals and agencies that may otherwise not be defined as part
of the innovation community.
This type of multi stakeholder engagement is certainly not without its challenges.
Points of resistance
Existing networks and systems of knowledge production privileges advanced
industrial countries. The strengths of networks in Europe and North America
derive from higher levels of resources, critical mass of scholars and established
research traditions and values (academic freedom etc).
In theory building and agenda development processes ideas emerge, are
contested, take root, are developed further. In a Kuhnian sense some ideas may
become part of a dominant paradigm. This process requires patience and
fortitude and can challenge the ability of scholars to sustain themselves on the
margin of their disciplines and institutions
At periods in the cycle where there is more acceptance of the ideas, the
revolutionary nature of the ideas and the trenchancy of the critique may itself be
muted. Acceptance and influence morph into co-optation.
Operating from the South has a specific set of challenges in terms of paucity of
resources, rigid disciplinary boundaries and the propensity of southern-based
scholars to network more with extra-regional partners than within their solidarity
zone.
Why Now?
If scholars shape agendas and can be agents of change by confronting
established categories and prompting a confrontation of ideas and values, we
can be part of the stimulating factors that trigger change.
A number of confluences are helpful
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the economic crisis and the reflection that it prompted
challenges to the established “hegemonic” theories of economic growth
innovation is itself on the agenda of firms
environmental stewardship and intergenerational responsibility has a higher
priority
policy makers have move to a greater understanding of the importance of
learning, capability building and technological upgrading for economic
growth, competitiveness and improvements in social services delivery
demand for greater social inclusion within and among countries
changes in governance of development institutions
solidarity among emerging countries
Values and Objectives
If innovation is of value because it has the potential and is a requirement for
balanced, equitable growth that is not environmentally damaging, it is also
necessary to understand the conditions under which this potential is realized.
This does require private sector firms to move beyond a narrow profit
maximizing model and be concerned with social value and intergenerational
wealth creation.
Research Programme
Shift the attention from scientific and technological inputs to innovation
processes and outputs
Changes the focus of analysis from the internal workings of an economic
system to the way the system interacts with the outside world;
can assist in identifying which critical elements are missing within a country or
whether there are imbalances and distortions and hence identify obstacles of
a well-functioning system
Enables the identification and development of new policy capabilities required
to set strategic priorities and to translate these into incentive schemes and
institutional change, as international markets change in the course of
globalization and as a country reaches higher stages of economic
development.
The need for policy initiatives to respond to the very specific needs, priorities
and capabilities of a developing country.
Process of building up indigenous capacity
Next Steps
It may be possible to build on the momentum arising from the IFD symposium to
develop a plan of action or a framework from which to proceed.
Any action is likely to proceed from a multipolar basis, drawing on the passion
and areas of interest of various scholars.
Sharing of experience and lessons is a prerequisite for building community and
that ought to be through formal and informal mechanisms
• student exchanges,
• joint teaching programmes
•faculty exchanges.
We can be ambitious in dreaming also about developing institutions in the South
with an explicit developmental agenda. That particular road is littered with
examples that have not worked, but perhaps the time is now ……
Thank you
For further information
[email protected]