Promoting Innovation

Innovation can take the form of the introduction of new technologies, skills, production processes, marketing practices and so on.

The most common approach to the evaluation of a country’s innovation capacity is the National Innovation Systems (NIS) framework. However, this often is of limited value in a developing economy where there may be no real national innovation system in existence at all.

The use of what is known as a Sectoral Innovation Systems (SIS) framework can help to address this issue. This allows for   constraints, bottlenecks, and other missing components of an innovation system to be identified through a process of evidence based diagnostics customized to the specific characteristics of the sector. This in turn allows for the development of policies aimed at progressively building a true national system aligned with the structural and cultural dimensions of the economy.
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Communiqué International utilises this diagnostics approach when working with developing countries on the development of innovation policy.

Our diagnostic methodology is divided into two stages. The first concentrates on building a “big picture” view of a country’s economic performance, the pieces of a national innovation system which may be in place, an exercise to benchmark its innovation performance, and a “rough and ready” global diagnostic of the state of the country’s national system.

The core of our approach lies in the second stage which focuses on identifying bottlenecks at different sectoral levels of national innovation. It prioritises intense public-private consultation and close hands-on collaboration with national authorities and experts to engender ownership and foster local capacity building to ensure that our know-how and approach is transferred to the governments and innovation actors who can then can carry on the exercises themselves.