Innovation and Economic Development
By J. Fagerberg, Martin Srholec, Bart Verspagen. 2009
391 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Innovation is often seen as carried out by highly educated labor in R&D intensive companies with strong ties to leading centers of excellence in the scientific world. Seen from this angle innovation is a typical “first world” activity. There is, however, another way to look at innovation that goes significantly beyond this high-tech picture. In this broader perspective, innovation—the attempt to try out new or improved products, processes, or ways to do things—is an aspect of most if not all economic activities. In this sense, Section 1 puts forward the idea that innovation may be as relevant in the developing part of the world as elsewhere. Section 2 discusses the existing theoretical and empirical literature on the subject. An important conclusion is that to be able to exploit technology to their own advantage, developing countries need to develop the necessary capabilities for doing so. But what are these capabilities and how can they be measured? Section 3 surveys attempts to identify and measure capabilities at the national level. However, the development of such capabilities, it is argued, depends in important ways on what firms do. Section 4, therefore, focuses on recent attempts to survey innovation activity in firms in developing countries and what can be learnt from that. Section 5 discusses the role of domestic versus foreign sources in fostering innovation in the developing part of the world. The final section summarizes the main lessons.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/654e50e2defa783e4c5dd9eddcdb77b7a934c01e
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Citations in the corpus
- Innovation and productivity in formal and informal firms in Ghana (2017, neutral): “Consistent with the mainstream literature on the role of innovation in emerging and developed countries (Fagerberg et al., 2010) and evidence from studies in LICs (Bloom et al.”
- General Sources of General Purpose Technologies in Complex Societies: Theory of Global Leadership-Driven Innovation, Warfare and Human Development (2015, neutral): “[81,38,45,46,196]).”
- The Creation and Diffusion of Innovation in Developing Countries : A Systematic Literature Review (2016, neutral): “Moreover other literature reviews of this field do not specifically focus on developing countries (Cohen, 2012), or may concentrate on the broad role of innovation on economic development, with limited evidence from low-income countries (Fagerberg et al., 2010).”
- Do Global Value Chains Offer Developing Countries Learning and Innovation Opportunities? (2017, background): “…years some emerging countries have displayed rapid catch up trajectories (Lee and Malerba, 2017), most developing countries continue to suffer from lack of indigenous technological resources and capabilities, and rely mainly on technology transferred from advanced countries (Fagerberg et al, 2010).”
- Crafting Sustainable Development Solutions: Frugal Innovations of Grassroots Entrepreneurs (2016, background): “Over the years, Schumpeter’s intuitions have been largely validated by empirical research in the field of industrial innovation [2–4].”