Local Systems of Production

I have had several discussions with a friend on innovation and innovation systems. According to my friend innovation is a Euro-centric or American concept. Innovations cannot occur where there are no institutions that support it e.g. in Africa and many other developing countries. According to him many developing countries simply have no or very poor regional systems of innovation (RSI) and if they are at all then they do not qualify to be known as such. In the long run he only felt that maybe developing countries could have National Innovation Systems. As the discussion went on and he also felt that evolutionary economics cannot be applied to the economic processes of Africa. Lastly discussing about technology, he felt that this too is a western term and hence can not be applied harphazardly to any other economy.

In my answer to him, I asked him several questions: What is innovation? What is the purpose of innovation? How does innovation occur? When is an innovation considered an innovation? Are poor countries completely incapable of innovating? Then we moved to technology and lastly economics both mainstream approaches and heterodox approaches.

Technological innovation is a contextual process whose relevance should be assessed on the social economic situations it is embedded in. Technological innovation focuses largely on mechanical approach that emphasizes gradual technological accumulation. While this approach may be satisfactory in capturing the process of industrialization and manufacturing it does very little to capture various types of innovation processes. There is also the process of social innovation which involves trans formative work, solving complex societal problems and introducing real social change. In most cases social innovations are as a result of a
collaborative effort between various players. Certainly there are different sets of institutions that are required for a social innovation on the one hand and a technological innovation on the other.