Origins of Term
The term National System of Innovation originated when Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Åke Lundvall worked together in the late 1980s. Freeman's research drew heavily on political economy of Friedrich List and was historical account of the rise of Japan as an economic superpower. Lundvall's work explored the important social interactions between suppliers and customers and their role in encouraging innovation in Denmark. Apart from a general definition, as above, there is no canonical definition of national innovation systems. A few dominant definitions are listed below (quoted by the OECD publication National Innovation Systems, 1997) which overlap quite a bit:
A national system of innovation has been defined as follows:
- .. the network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and interactions initiate, import, modify and diffuse new technologies.
- .. the elements and relationships which interact in the production, diffusion and use of new, and economically useful, knowledge ... and are either located within or rooted inside the borders of a nation state.
- ... a set of institutions whose interactions determine the innovative performance ... of national firms.
- .. the national institutions, their incentive structures and their competencies, that determine the rate and direction of technological learning (or the volume and composition of change generating activities) in a country.
- .. that set of distinct institutions which jointly and individually contribute to the development and diffusion of new technologies and which provides the framework within which governments form and implement policies to influence the innovation process. As such it is a system of interconnected institutions to create, store and transfer the knowledge, skills and artefacts which define new technologies.
Read more about this topic: National Innovation System
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or term:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)