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Beyond the “Charmed Circle” of OECD: New Directions for Studies of National Innovation Systems

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Abstract

In this paper, we engage with the widespread and influential approach of National Innovation Systems (NIS). We discuss its adequacy to non-OECD countries, especially in Latin America where it tends to be reified. Although the NIS approach is meant to address the most pressing needs of the economies it applies to, we argue that it would benefit from developing a more encompassing scope, allowing integration of greater diversity and complexity. By retracing the history of regimes of science, technology and innovation in Latin America, we explore the following paradox: whereas numerous Southern scholars urge the pressing need to develop an innovation agenda for Southern countries with a “Southern framework of thought”, they continue to heavily rely on a reductionist version of the NIS-approach that prevents such a “Southern perspective” to fully emerge. This creates problems for actors willing to use NIS more reflexively, and it also affects the effectivity of science, technology and innovation (STI) policies in non-OECD countries. We formulate a research agenda with three suggestions for further engaging NIS both conceptually and practically. Using such analytical perspectives, we argue, might benefit both to scholarly work about NIS, but could also allow for a better articulation with STI regimes in Southern countries.

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Notes

  1. For example, Viotti (2002: 656) points out the bias of NIS studies towards “innovation”, which has a secondary role or possibly no role at all in the process of Southern countries’ technical change.

  2. In his view: “The main striking difference with respect to the recent evolution of India’s NIS is that their economic reforms were not as influenced by the Washington Consensus’s recommendations as was the case in Brazil. Therefore, in the Indian experience the introduction of liberalizing reforms, aside from breaking with strongly protectionist practices, did not imply significant discontinuity with respect to industrial and technological policies that had been adopted in the country before the early 1990s” (Nassif 2007: 20).

  3. Our actual attempt to look at current patterns of change in Latin American STI regimes resonates with the concept of “endogenous future” (Rip and Te Kulve 2008: 51): the idea that further developments are predicated on the pattern of present situation, which shows choices, contingencies, possibilities and emerging irreversibilities.

  4. Although, according to Vidal and Marí (2002), both international institutions had the same philosophy. UNESCO was promoting a pure science based on academic excellence while OAS constituted a more “hybrid model” that combined a support to basic scientific infrastructure with the promotion of technological development.

  5. Jorge Sabato developed in particular a triangle’s science and technology policy model (i.e. Sabato 2004 [1979]), anticipating the now famous so-called “triple helix” model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1998; 2000). In the late 1960s, Sabato was very visible at the OECD in Paris (thanks to Jean-Jacques Salomon, a key ST policy figure in the 1970s) and in SPRU (Sussex). His (and other Latin American scientists’) personal relations and interactions with key figures of innovation studies helped the concept of innovation to permeate through the Latin American movement of STD (see Vidal and Marí 2002).

  6. Dependency theory was certainly not made of one single current of thought, however. Vernengo rightly points at the two different coexisting traditions in dependency theory, while he underscores that both groups would agree that at the core of the dependency relation between center and periphery lies the inability of the periphery to develop an autonomous and dynamic process of technological innovation (Vernengo 2006: 552).

  7. See the RICYT website: http://www.ricyt.org/ (last consulted March 31st, 2012).

  8. Wallerstein explicitly acknowledges dependency theory’s influence (both its concepts and its diagnosis) as one of the origins of world-system analysis (Wallerstein 2006: 34–35).

  9. For example in the Handbook of Innovation Systems and Developing Countries, edited by Lundvall et al. (2009). See also Metcalfe and Ramlogan (2008).

  10. One example of such an approach, particularly visible in Belgium and in France, is the deflation of wealth generation in the so-called “Degrowth” conferences and the R&D research consortium for Research & Degrowth. See the website http://www.degrowth.eu/ (last consulted March 31st, 2012).

  11. Amilcar Herrera and his collaborators were already concerned about these risks when they opposed to the Club of Rome’s project “The limits to growth” and suggested a counter-global model, originating from Latin America (see Herrera et al. 2004).

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Arie Rip and Daniel Sarewitz’s very helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Penny Thoreau for her tireless support. This paper was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, F.R.S.-FNRS (Belgium).

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  1. FNRS, STS Unit, Spiral, University of Liège, Boulevard du Rectorat 7, B31, bte 29, 4000, Liège, Belgium

    Pierre Delvenne & François Thoreau

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Correspondence to Pierre Delvenne.

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Delvenne, P., Thoreau, F. Beyond the “Charmed Circle” of OECD: New Directions for Studies of National Innovation Systems. Minerva 50, 205–219 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-012-9195-5

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