National Systems of Entrepreneurship: Measurement issues and policy implications

We introduce a novel concept of National Systems of Entrepreneurship and provide an approach to characterizing them. National Systems of Entrepreneurship are fundamentally resource allocation systems that are driven by individual-level opportunity pursuit, through the creation of new ventures, with this activity and its outcomes regulated by country-specific institutional characteristics. In contrast with the institutional emphasis of the National Systems of Innovation frameworks, where institutions engender and regulate action, National Systems of Entrepreneurship are driven by individuals, with institutions regulating who acts and the outcomes of individual action. Building on these principles, we also introduce a novel index methodology to characterize National Systems of Entrepreneurship. The distinctive features of the methodology are: (1) systemic approach, which allows interactions between components of National Systems of Entrepreneurship; (2) the Penalty for Bottleneck feature, which identifies bottleneck factors that hold back system performance; (3) contextualization, which recognizes that national entrepreneurship processes are always embedded in a given country's institutional framework.     

Three frames for innovation policy: R&D,systems of innovation and transformative change

Science, technology and innovation (STI) policy is shaped by persistent framings that arise from historical context. Two established frames are identified as co-existing and dominant in contemporary innovation policy discussions. The first frame is identified as beginning with a Post-World War II institutionalisation of government support for science and R&D with the presumption that this would contribute to growth and address market failure in private provision of new knowledge. The second frame emerged in the 1980s globalising world and its emphasis on competitiveness which is shaped by the national systems of innovation for knowledge creation and commercialisation. STI policy focuses on building links, clusters and networks, and on stimulating learning between elements in the systems, and enabling entrepreneurship. A third frame linked to contemporary social and environmental challenges such as the Sustainable Development Goals and calling for transformative change is identified and distinguished from the two earlier frames. Transformation refers to socio-technical system change as conceptualised in the sustainability transitions literature. The nature of this third framing is examined with the aim of identifying its key features and its potential for provoking a re-examination of the earlier two frames. One key feature is its focus on experimentation, and the argument that the Global South does not need to play catch-up to follow the transformation model of the Global North. It is argued that all three frames are relevant for policymaking, but exploring options for transformative innovation policy should be a priority.     

Regulatory policy, value of knowledge assets and innovation strategy: The case of the Orphan Drug Act

The U.S. Orphan Drug Act provides R&D incentives to drug-makers that go beyond statutory patent protection. The study explores the act's effect on financial returns to innovation and on the strategy of orphan drug development. Results indicate that the financial return to orphan drug development is positive. The findings suggest that when market size is small and cumulative innovation is an important phenomenon the policy that extends effective patent duration or subsidizes R&D activity improves incentives to innovate.     

The evolving nature of Taiwan's national innovation system: The case of biotechnology innovation networks

The dynamics of national innovation systems (NISs) are a source of considerable academic and policy interest, especially when to address new competitive challenges they involve changing institutions and relationships within successful systems. This paper examines the case of Taiwan which is embarking on a new phase in its approach to building its national innovative capacity through creating the infrastructure for a biotechnology industry. By examining the process and mechanisms by which new biotechnology innovation networks are being created, and contrasting their development with existing networks, we analyse the dynamics of Taiwan's NIS. The paper reviews the prospects for this new phase in Taiwan's transition from ‘imitation’ to ‘innovation’. The paper aims to add to the understanding of how innovation systems evolve. It is concerned with the contributors, processes and challenges of NIS evolution and the form and meaning of its dynamic changes.     

Innovation policy for system-wide transformation: The case of strategic innovation programmes (SIPs) in Sweden

The orientation towards grand societal challenges can be seen as a new wave or paradigm for innovation policy. Such policy aims at system-wide transformation and is often referred to as system innovation policy. While insights from transition studies have provided novel and useful rationales for innovation policy targeting system-wide transformation, it remains unclear how to design, implement and evaluate such policies. The contribution of this paper is to translate and concretize the challenges of system innovation policy towards scope for policy action and analysis. Building on insights from transition studies we group the challenges into four domains: directionality, experimentation, demand articulation, and policy coordination and learning. We relate challenges within the four domains to three generic features of innovation systems: interests and capabilities of actors, networks, and institutions. The derived framework is applied in a case study on the strategic innovation programmes, a recent policy initiative by Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency, targeting system innovation.     

The evolution of science policy and innovation studies

This article examines the origins and evolution of the field of science policy and innovation studies (SPIS). Like other studies in this Special Issue, it seeks to systematically identify the key intellectual developments in the field over the last 50 years by analysing the publications that have been highly cited by other researchers. The analysis reveals how the emerging field of SPIS drew upon a growing range of disciplines in the late 1950s and 1960s, and how the relationship with these disciplines evolved over time. Around the mid-1980s, substantial parts of SPIS started to coalesce into a more coherent field centred on the adoption of an evolutionary (or neo-Schumpeterian) economics framework, an interactive model of the innovation process, and (a little later) the concept of ‘systems of innovation’ and the resource-based view of the firm. The article concludes with a discussion of whether SPIS is perhaps in the early stages of becoming a discipline.     

Russia's innovation policy: Stubborn path-dependencies and new approaches

For the last twenty years Russia has been struggling to turn itself into an efficient market economy. Innovation and technological development are considered to be one of the best ways to achieve impressive results. The country has succeeded in retaining certain strengths of the Soviet science and technology system but it has often failed to address the former weaknesses and emerging challenges. There are a number of external and internal factors that make reforms inevitable and urgent. In the last five-six years the political leadership has started an unprecedented attempt to reverse the negative trends and boost Russia's innovation performance. This paper studies the new policy approaches and suggests several others that might be considered useful at this stage of the country's development. This work contributes to the wider debate on the heterogeneity of national innovation systems and adaptation of the respective analytical approach to the study of technological development of the emerging economies. It also provides a detailed review of the literature and data sources on the Russian science and technology, and aims to start filling in the gap in this seriously understudied research area.     

Embeddedness, social epistemology and breakthrough innovation: The case of the development of statins

Radical, breakthrough innovations create not only great industrial possibilities, but also great social uncertainties. When a breakthrough medical technology is discovered, the question arises as to whether to accept the possible risks involved, or to defer implementing the innovation until more data is available, and, specifically, until others have taken up the innovation and demonstrated both its efficacy, its relative safety and market acceptance. Specifically, when a firm discovers a new candidate substance for a first in its class drug, how to evaluate the potential risks becomes a key predicament for management. This paper focuses on the role of a firm's social networks and national innovation system context in influencing the social epistemology around potential breakthrough innovations. Through an examination of the processes of drug development related to the same candidate substance in a Japanese firm and an American firm, we suggest that, in addition to organizational capabilities at the corporate level, social capital, specifically formed under a certain innovation system, plays a key role in leading to the successful introduction of breakthrough innovations.     

The evolving relations between government agencies of innovation policymaking in emerging economies: A policy network approach and its application to the Chinese case

Literature on innovation policy reveals little of how relations between government agencies as policymakers evolve. Taking the policy network approach, this paper investigates three mechanisms underlining the evolution of inter-government agency relations in emerging economies – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence, and applies them to the analysis of the evolution of innovation policymaking in China. Operationally, the paper proposes a social network analysis (SNA)-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network, which consists of 463 innovation policy documents formulated by its central government ministries between 1980 and 2011. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has been not only sustained through the intervention of policy agendas but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in China’s innovation policy network’s evolution differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. This work advances our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and has implications for innovation policymaking in emerging economies.     

Emergence and development of the National Innovation Systems concept

Adopting a science and technology studies (S&TS) perspective and organized around eight major themes, this paper analyzes the development of the National Innovation Systems (NIS) concept, examining how the formal body of codified NIS knowledge was produced, developed and spread, and how it is used. In order to trace its history, I interviewed major advocates of the NIS concept to understand how and why it has become so widespread in academic and policymaking circles. The eight themes serve as ‘missing pieces’ to explain the early history of the NIS concept.     

Advancing innovation in the public sector: Aligning innovation measurement with policy goals

There is sufficient evidence, drawn from surveys of innovation in the public sector and cognitive testing interviews with public sector managers, to develop a framework for measuring public sector innovation. Although many questions that are covered in the Oslo Manual guidelines for measuring innovation in the private sector can be applied with some modifications to the public sector, public sector innovation surveys need to meet policy needs that require collecting additional types of data. Policy to support public sector innovation requires data on how public sector organizations innovate and how a strategic management approach to innovation can influence the types of innovations that are developed. Both issues require innovations surveys to delve deeply into the innovation processes and strategies that are used by public sector managers. Implementation of the measurement framework proposed in this paper would open up opportunities for a new, policy-relevant research program on public sector innovation.     

National innovation system in less successful developing countries: the case of Thailand

This paper, using Thailand as a case study, aims at understanding the national innovation system (NIS) in developing countries which are less successful in technological catching-up. In contrast to developed countries, the development level of Thailand’s NIS does not link to its economic structural development level. As Thailand moves from agricultural to an increasingly industrial economy, its NIS remains weak and fragmented. The mismatch between the two affected Thailand’s competitiveness and partially contributed to the recent economic crisis. Studies of NIS in countries like Thailand should focus on factors contributing to the long-running perpetuation of weak and fragmented NIS.     

Policies for science, technology and innovation: Translating rationales into regional policies in a multi-level setting

Departing from a number of theoretical perspectives from which rationales for science, technology and innovation (STI) policy can be extracted, this paper discusses three questions. First, what rationales for public intervention can be derived from different economic theories, including theories usually associated with spatial dynamics and territorial relationships? Second, what policy instruments or policy-mixes can be associated with the various rationales? Third, what do these theories and associated rationales tell us about the territorial level or levels at which STI policies can usefully be designed and implemented?     

一种由需求驱动的信息技术创新与扩散政策生成体系

分析了信息技术创新扩散的因果关系。认为 ,IT市场的信息不完全性、市场结构、信息技术网络外特性 ,是决定信息技术创新扩散的原因。针对传统的、单一的以信息技术R&D为目标的IT政策 ,或单一的面向扩散的信息技术政策 ;提出了一种由信息技术市场需求驱动的、协调信息技术供应商、信息技术潜在接受者、信息技术政策决策者关系的IT政策产生系统及其输出 ,其目的在于调节信息技术扩散速率 ,使其达到Pareto意义下的最优扩散路径 ,并详细地分析了该信息技术政策体系的结构与原理。     

Innovation investments, market engagement and financial performance: A study among Australian manufacturing SMEs

Innovation-related activities within firms have traditionally been viewed as primary drivers of product and service differentiation and hopefully firm performance. Such views assume the effective transfer of newly developed products or services to a market willing to transact for the innovative products at a price that sustains the research, development and commercialisation processes behind the initial investments. In this paper, we ‘unpack’ this model linking primary R&D and related activities, the steps taken within the firm's market and transform its operational presence, and measures of firm performance. Using a sample of 449 Australian manufacturing companies from the Business Longitudinal Survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the paper develops a mediated model by which we examine the impact of innovation on firm performance mediated through a firm's market engagement and transformation strategies. This paper finds that organisational performance is driven by innovation only when mediated through these transformation outcomes. The results contribute to the innovation literature in finding that innovation-related activities can only drive a firm's competitive advantage when they occur concomitantly with actual changes in the market position and offerings of firms.     

Internationalization of innovation systems: A survey of the literature

While there is a large literature on the internationalization of economic activity (including R&D) at the corporate level, there are not many studies of the degree of internationalization of innovation systems. The few studies that exist show that national innovation systems are becoming internationalized, even if the institutions that support them remain country-specific. To the extent that the far more numerous studies of internationalization of corporate R&D discuss innovation systems at all, they point to the continued importance of national institutions to support innovative activity, even though that activity is itself becoming increasingly internationalized.     

股票市场与货币政策相关性研究

针对我国证券市场与货币政策之间的相互作用日益突出这一现实,利用关联度的分析方法,通过这两者之间的深入研究,我国中央银行在制定货币政策时,应更多关注股票市场的发展与变动,借助股票市场这一传导渠道影响实体经济,促进经济增长。     

国家利益主导下的科技政策发展趋势分析

在分析科技政策含义的基础上,探讨政府在科技发展中的主导性,大力加强基础研究的科技投入,积极促进官、产、学的科技研发联合,积极开展国际科技合作,建立完善的国家创新系统等科技政策发展趋势。     

First adoption of consumer innovations: Exploring market failure and alleviating factors

Consumers innovate usually for non-commercial motives. They generally lack incentives to diffuse, and this is expected to hamper first adoption – even if consumer innovations are valuable to many other people. We confirm this market failure with survey data of 164 German consumer innovators. First adoption by others is unrelated with general use value, unless the innovator is highly willing to commercialize. Next, as classical diffusion theory does not explain when consumer innovations become available to others, we propose an individual-object-process (I-O-P) framework to study factors alleviating the market failure. The viability of the framework is explored by studying the moderating role of entrepreneurial experience (I), product newness (O) and community engagement during the innovation process (P). First adoption of generally valuable consumer innovations is enhanced when a community was involved. We also find tentative evidence for a moderating role of entrepreneurial experience and product newness.     

Innovation in times of crisis: National Systems of Innovation, structure, and demand

This article addresses the impact of the current economic downturn on innovation across Europe. Using micro- and macro-data, we investigate to what extent some structural characteristics of National Systems of Innovation, along with demand, affect firms’ persistency in terms of innovation investment. It emerges that the effects of the economic downturn in terms of firms’ innovation investment are not the same across European countries. The competences and quality of the human resources, the specialization in the high-technology sector, together with the development of the financial system seem to be the structural factors which are able to offset the effect of the economic downturn on innovation investments of firms across Europe. Finally, some considerations about policies during recessions are discussed.