Article,
Comparing innovation systems: a framework and application to China’s transitional context
Research Policy, 30 (7): 1091--1114 (2001)
DOI: 10.1016/S0048-7333(00)00132-3
Abstract
This paper proposes a generic framework for analyzing innovation systems,
anchored around five fundamental activities — R&D, implementation,
end-use, education, linkage — and focused on the performance implications
of a system’s structure and dynamics. Rather than simply describing
the role and performance of particular actors, institutions and policies,
this approach focuses on system-level characteristics, including
the distribution of these activities within the system, the organizational
boundaries around them, coordination mechanisms, evolutionary processes,
and the effectiveness of the system in introducing, diffusing and
exploiting technological innovations. The framework is applied to
a comparison of China’s national innovation system under central
planning and since reforms, revealing the evolving structure and
dynamics of this system and current inconsistencies and perverse
incentives that policymakers must address to realize their development
goals. More generally, it provides a basis for addressing the implicit
assumptions of organizational types, roles and convergence among
innovation systems emerging in very different contexts, whether national,
regional or industrial.
