原文来自Research@Intel
Innovation Policy in the Age of Decentralized Innovation
posted by Dawn Nafus on December 03, 2008
I had the pleasure of recently attending the joint OECD-World Bank Conference on Innovation and Sustainable Growth.Innovation policy appears to be having a bit of a renaissance. As OECDSecretary-General Angel Gurría put it, with so much innovationhappening as a matter of adoption, or services, innovation policy hasmoved beyond raising a country’s patenting rate or dollars spent inresearch labs. Indeed OECD economist Sam Paltridge had pointed out thatwhile the twentieth century tech transfer was marked by leading-edgeindustrial engineers visiting factories in developing economies, todayfirms like Intel and Nokia are now just as likely to sendanthropologists to talk to end users.
Gurríaalso noted that innovation is no longer a rich country affair:innovation plays a role in economic growth at all levels of nationalincome. Indeed some of the most exciting innovation comes from some ofthe poorest corners of the world. Mobile phones now serve as ATMs inAfrica. Latin America has some of the most progressive roaming andpricing innovations in the world. Our own Technology Metabolism Index has shown that adoption is not a staged progression from rich countries to poor ones.
While the room full of economists, public policy experts, governmentrepresentatives and a lone anthropologist (me) could agree thatconditions have changed, it did not agree on what the public policyresponse should be. Controversy focused on whether, as a public policygoal, poor countries should imitate rich countries to ‘catch up,’ inlight of how much innovation has changed. If innovation is much moreheterogeneous and decentralized than it once was, then we might be morelikely to see multiple paths, not a single one. Many pointed out thatKorea’s innovation policies that lead to it catching up to rich countryincome levels would be of questionable legality under currentinternational trade policies. World Bank official Carlos Alberto PrimoBraga was particularly concerned that an overenthusiasm forheterogeneous, often user-driven efforts could lead to laissez fairepolicies, reminding us that “it is my job to alleviate poverty.” Thisraised the question, is it possible to alleviate poverty and stimulateeconomic growth without ‘imitate the rich’ as a framework for thinkingabout how to do it? As an anthropologist, I would answer yes. Here iswhy.
As we leave the twentieth century and head into the twenty first, wehave left the system of mass production and mass media. This has leadto what the social scientists call a splintering. On the one hand, asthings go global they get more standardized and generic than ever. Onthe other hand, heterogeneity and difference are also more importantthan ever. For example, as multiple devices make their way intopeoples’ homes, international standards bodies become more important toensure there is enough spectrum available for those devices. At thesame time, you become your own FCC of your living room, makingdecisions about how close your mobile phone can be to the TV screenbefore interference develops. We could say a similar thing is happeningwith devices. With over a billion people using informationtechnologies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say what theyare actually using them for, other than to connect with others in someway. A pretty generic explanation! Yet there is increasing diversity indevices, with MIDs and netbooks and Classmates now in the picture, eachsatisfying needs better than a single, generic device could ever do.
Prof. Luc Soete provided the public policy corollary to thisprinciple. International trade standards, including IPR, areincreasingly important to get right if all countries are going to becompetitive on a global marketplace. It is no use providing aid topoorer countries if (as some have charged) rich countries use the IPRsystem as a way to close their markets. At the same time he predictsthat better trade rules might foster more geographic specialization inthe kinds of innovations each country produces. The twenty firstcentury is in its infancy, but if the splintering theory proves true,there still will be plenty of room for large scale players such asstandards bodies and multinational companies to innovate and enableothers to do the same. What changes, however, is that it becomes evenmore important to have institutional innovators alongside smart peoplemaking smart technologies.
