Innovation Development

How can we foster more socially responsible pro-peace innovations that also have deeper impact? In arguing that incorporating contextual, area-specific and conflict-sensitive guidance enhances the quality and depth of innovation, this article calls for a new research approach on Peace Innovation (PI). This approach could help overcome four existing challenges: expanding the scholar–entrepreneur–policy triad of PI; prioritizing ethical, culturally sensitive engagement; designing innovation to more clearly deliver positive impacts in conflict environments; and glocalizing the PI playing field. We then explore five thematic areas where PI can be impactful: forecasting political economies of conflict; business and virtual peacebuilding; climate and environmentalism; migration and identity; and urbanization. Finally, we discuss how to operationalize such partnerships, moving the theoretical discussion on PI forward for both the peacebuilding and innovation communities. Pushing research f...

Using World Bank’s Ethiopian Enterprise Survey round of 2011 and 2015 data from Ethiopian manufacturing and service firms, this paper identifies the effect of financial services on the innovation strategies of firms. We find a strong positive correlation between firm’s access to external finance and its innovative activities. Our preferred specification, the instrumental variable estimator, suggests that a 1% rise in external financing source in the firm’s total fund increases the propensity to innovate the firm’s operation by about 2%. In a similar spirit, credit-constrained firms have about 24% lower incidence of innovation compared to credit unconstrained firms. We find that the results are substantially robust across alternative econometric specification. The results also remain consistent for the individual components of innovation index such as product, process, organizational, marketing and R&D innovation activities.

This paper aims to broaden the horizon as well as to shed further light on the studies of interaction between firms and universities in a global context. Its starting point is thus a review of two different strands of the literature on innovation. First, the literature on interaction by Klevorick et al (1995) and Nelson (1993), and second, the more recent literature on Global Innovation Networks (GINs) by Ernst ( 2006) and The Economist Intelligence Unit ( 2007). These strands share a common problem: each has a blind spot in relation to the core focus of the other strand. The literature on interaction does not consider the international dimension in any depth, and the GINs literature does not integrate the university dimension adequately. This paper addresses the common weakness through a combination of the two approaches, searching for interactions between firms and universities globally. In doing so, the paper also puts forward a tentative framework on global interaction between f...

This paper explores how the conceptual elements of inclusive innovation theory can enhance similar approaches developed in the European context. In post-productivist, sustainable agriculture, bottom-up networks provide alternative sites of innovation to the official systems of knowledge creation, driving a focus on inclusive innovation. However, the origination and spread of inclusive innovation in sustainable agriculture depends on many social and economic factors. This article offers a framework to analyse these factors and their effect on the innovation capacity of networks in sustainable agriculture. We consider both internal and external dimensions of innovation, and also their interplay in a dynamic system. We describe the internal factors that shape the functioning of innovation networks in terms of organizational dynamism, while external factors are examined in terms of relational dynamism. We argue that reflexive adaptation to changing circumstances holds the key to successful innovation pathways. To illustrate our ideas, two Hungarian case studies are used, based on the EU-funded SOLINSA research project.

The subject-related literature provided information about the skills, education, and formal competencies required to join teams working on the innovation process. According to findings presented in this article, the previous studies have investigated insufficiently the gender-related issues in the decisions of managers who involve specialists in the innovation process. Thus, the purpose of this research was to identify, examine, and describe differences in the participation of men and women in the innovation process, considering their personal characteristics, attitudes, and behaviours. The research covered 1,164 innovative companies – beneficiaries of the European Union Cohesion Policy of 2007–2013. The survey was distributed independently to women and men participating in innovative activities in the researched companies. Two independent responses were received from each company; thus, two independent data samples were created. Both data composition and preliminary analysis adhere...

The strong growth and export performance in Africa for the last decade were largely due to higher international commodity prices and did not translate into the broad-based economic and social development needed to reduce poverty and create jobs for the underemployed. In this paper, we assume that this pattern of development can be explained by the weak nature and narrowness of the learning process that developed in relation to natural resource sectors. Lateral migration of knowledge from the natural resource-based sectors remains scarce in Africa. The paper examines the oil and gas sector in Algeria using the case of the oil giant producer Sonatrach. It shows that knowledge migration benefited internal capacity building and core downstream activities to a certain extent. The capacity of the dominant sector and company to contribute to competence building and innovation in general and specifically in manufacturing activities was, however, very limited and Algeria and, as many other African countries, remains overly dependent on the production and export of oil and gas.

The main aim of this study is to empirically examine the role of regional institutional quality, and compare the relative importance of three different institutional arrangements, namely regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption, on propensity of firm innovation in African countries. To this end, we used the most recent World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) of firms from 19 African countries. Our empirical investigation using multilevel logistic regression has drawn three important conclusions. First, there is no significant relationship between firm-specific factors, such as age, ownership, and exporting, and firm innovation. Nonetheless, firms’ propensity to innovate is significantly determined by the size of the firm, R&D expenditures, on-the-job training (OJT), and capability of managers/owners to adopt new technologies. Second, the innovation performance of firms is significantly affected by regional institutional quality. Third, among different regional institutional arran...

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of the determinants of innovation activities, and its effect on output and productivity across manufacturing and services firms in Mexico. We build on the theoretical framework of synthesis approach and contribute to identify the main differences of innovation intensity and its effects across four sectoral groups with different learning modes. Based on data from the 2010 Mexican innovation survey, our results show important differences across sectors and indicate that more dynamic services firms have similar innovation patterns to those in manufacturing. In terms of policy implications, this study highlights the importance of promoting innovation as the basis for improved productivity of firms in Mexico differentiating by sectors. More specifically, policy interventions need to enhance both the number of firms that perform innovation, and the intensity of those innovation activities.

ABSTRACT The feasibility of the concept of a national innovation system (NIS) in the globalizing world had already been questioned in its early days and recently long-time advocates of the NIS approach have also raised their doubts. Along with more traditional facilitating policy model, we propose conceptually platform-based policy models with four subcategories that can be considered as appropriate in relation to innovation policies that intend to deal with an increasing rate of border-crossing innovation activities. Building on the views of system and governance failure, we also argue that a community-oriented approach might provide more systemic and hence more efficient and self-sustaining linkages between regional innovation systems that are located in different countries. We will introduce some recent policy measures from the Nordic countries, especially from Finland but also from Denmark, in order to link the conceptual discussion to real-life policies. The purpose is by no means narrowly restricted to an empirical categorization of the Nordic cases, but to outline stylized policy models related to the internationalization of an innovation system that could be applied more generally when designing or analysing policies.

Technological innovation has been one of the fastest growing areas of economics scholarship and one where history and philosophy have played important roles. Since the reconstruction of Joseph Schumpeter’s view of innovation as a driver of capitalist development and the subsequent formation of the national innovation systems (NIS) theory in the early 1990s that can be described as neo-Schumpeterian, there has been a continuous attempt to explain innovation in social-scientific terms. However, much of this has positioned innovation as a value-neutral process. We argue that such value-neutrality requires closer analysis because the neo-Schumpeterian thinkers do appear to acknowledge that capitalism itself is an uneven, dynamic process. The relationship between the vital dynamism of such analysis of technological change and the context of its description of power relations and value deserves further attention. Under what conditions can systemic interactions between institutions and actors function as universal frameworks? Can the theory of innovation be abstracted from its social and political bases? This paper aims to redefine innovation as a predominately political process that is both historical and contextual, and thus draw out its implications for economics and development politics. The paper suggests some preliminary steps toward a more critical approach to innovation scholarship as part of a wider, heated ongoing debate about economics’ own relevance and contestation about its methods.