No 2013/33 Bridging Innovation System Research and Development Studies

challenges and research opportunities

Abstract

This paper links innovation system analysis to economic development. Both fields are young and interdisciplinary. In the recent years, there has been a renewed interest on applying the innovation system concept in developing countries. In the first part of this paper we try to specify the conditions under which innovation systems can be used in a developing country context; and we do so in a dialogue with critiques developed within the community of evolutionary and development scholars. In the second part of the paper we give a brief assessment of how development economics has evolved and we draw some lessons for a research strategy. We will argue that the crisis of the first generation of development economics that was represented by scholars such as Nurkse, Myrdal, Hirschman, Singer and Sen has left a void in development economics that cannot be filled neither by mainstream neoclassical economics nor by ‘new growth theory’. We see the innovation system approach as a serious candidate to fill this void.