Promoting innovation in developing countries

Developing countries tend to have relatively low productivity and to be lacking in economic diversification. Innovations are needed to create new and more productive sources of employment and income, to find responses to social challenges, and to enable developing countries to embark on the transition to development paths that are more sustainable in environmental terms.

In most cases the concern is less world-class technological breakthroughs than the ability to adopt and autonomously master new products and processes and to adapt them to the local context. Later technological development takes place under conditions quite unlike those faced by today’s industrialized countries when they developed their innovation systems. In a largely open world market, developing countries are faced with far more advanced competitors. New rules governing world trade have eliminated the approaches earlier adopted to acquire technological knowledge (reverse engineering, local content requirements for foreign investors). On the other hand, though, today technological knowledge can build on a huge stock of grown knowledge, some of which is publicly available and can be accessed via the new communication media.