Originally published in August 2015, revised in January 2018
I received many comments and tweets about the previous post. Thank you for ideas and comments
Some agreed that innovation is the result of culture. Some said that culture is not only created by management, but also by staff. For instance, the admin pool in a traditional engineering company can be very innovative (and creative) even if the rest of the business is stuck in the 1980s.
Somebody told me that creating an innovative culture is in itself a chicken-egg (low equilibrium) situation, because for a leader to create (or enable) an innovative culture takes innovation in itself. You can see where this is going.
Then I discovered a recent cartoon in my inbox by Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid fame. This cartoon says it all.
An organization that cannot change its culture (due to too rigid systems, due to lack of management capability, due to its people) has become trapped in time. While some organizations may exist like this due to sheer momentum, due to protection (by law), by continuous funding, or for whatever reason, will struggle to adapt to external change. These organizations are not resilient and they are at the mercy of external supporters (a.k.a clients, benefactors, funders or shareholders).
I was also asked how some organizations can still innovative despite a poor innovation culture. Again, it is of course possible to replace a machine, or for a few people in an organization to design something brilliant, or for a new process to emerge. Of course it is possible. But it takes much more energy, determination of a few, and some really tenacity to be innovative in an un-innovative (what is the right word here?) culture.
I am sure more comments will come.
Cheers, Shawn
I appreciated the comments received by e-mail, but wonder why people are not posting comments to this article? Is the WordPress registration process to difficult? Please let me know. And keep those comments coming!
Originally published in August 2015, revised in January 2018
Reflecting on the correspondence I have received after my previous post and recent training sessions with manufacturers, I have come to realise that people are looking for tools and tricks to encourage innovation in their workplaces. Sometimes it is actually not even about innovation, but about making up for poor past decisions, such as not investing in technology or market development when they should have. Others think of innovation as a function or as a management tool that can be standardised into a job description or an area of responsibility. While this is possible in some contexts, I don’t find this approach to innovation of much use in the smaller and medium-sized manufacturing firms and the research/technology institution space in which I am working.
For me, innovation is firstly a value, a perspective of how organisations should be. When management says, “We are an innovative organisation “or” We want an innovative culture “or” Our reputation is that we are innovative”, then we can move to tools, portfolios, tricks and tweaks (those things that people in innovation functions must attend to). Many textbooks, articles and blog sites on innovation and technology management are then useful. Actually the challenge is to decide which of the bucket loads of advice to use, and consultants such as I typically help organisations to choose a few tools and provide guidance on how to use them fully and consistently. I would dare to say that it is relatively easy to help companies that are already innovative to become more innovative.
What really intrigues me is those organisations that do not think of themselves as being innovative, or that are from industries considered to be traditional and not innovative. Perhaps they used to be innovative, or perhaps they are innovative in some areas but not in others. Perhaps they had one or two tricks in the past that have now become irrelevant. These could be extremely competent organisations, such as a university department, a manufacturer of highly specialised industrial equipment or an organisation that simply designs and manufacturers exactly what its customers order. Even if the outputs of these organisations can be described as ‘innovative’, they do not necessarily have innovative cultures that are constantly creating novel ideas, processes and markets. In my experience these organisations have brilliant technical people, but management is often not able to harness the genius, experience or creativity of its people. The main reason for this is not a lack of technique, tools or tricks, but the lack of an innovative culture, leading to a lack of innovative purpose.
These organisations are trapped. They are equipped for the past, and they are paralysed by all the choices they have to make for the future. For management, it feels as though everything it has in place is inadequate and needs equal attention, ranging from attracting staff with better or different qualifications to finding new markets, developing new technological capability, sorting out cash flow and capital expenditure, and addressing succession planning.
Improving the innovation culture of an organisation is a complex issue. It is not about tasks, functions or tools, but about changing relations between people within and beyond the boundaries of the organisation. Innovation in these organisations is a sideshow, a project, whereas it really needs to be central to the business strategy, a different way of looking at the world.
When working with organisations that must improve their innovative culture, interventions like motivational speeches and optimistic visions of the future are not useful and could in fact deepen the crises facing management. Nurturing a culture of innovation goes far beyond establishing or refining innovation management functions. It is a strategic issue that is initiated by top management, but that will soon spill over into every area of the organisation, hence it cannot be driven by a management function called ‘innovation’.
Improving the innovation culture process starts with connecting management back with its people. It starts in the present, the now, not with future scenarios, not with using innovation techniques and better analytical tools, and in most cases not with some or other management fad. It goes beyond trying to improve products, processes or business areas, beyond gaps in management’s capability. It must look at the relations between people, between what people know and can do now (or knew and could do in the recent past), and the potential people see to make small improvements. It is essentially about many dialogues happening throughout and even beyond the organisation. After cultivating dialogue, management needs to empower the organisation’s people to allocate resources to activities that strengthen the learning culture, that turn even small improvement projects into processes that broaden thinking, deepen learning and motivate people to think beyond just their specific tasks.
When management has the courage to decide to improve its culture of innovation it starts a process that cannot be described as incremental improvement, as that sounds too directed. It is rather like a deepening, or an awakening, where employees are inspired to contribute, and management is more aware of what it can do to enable its employees to become more innovative on all fronts. Of course, management faces the risk that outdated management approaches that do not seek to empower employees to be creative will be exposed, and some tough decisions will have to be made.
To nurture an innovative culture requires innovation in itself. It requires management at different levels to rethink its roles from being directive to being enabling, from being top down to being more engaged with its teams.
Originally published in 2015, revised in February 2018
I am currently focused on strengthening the manufacturing sector. I am speaking more and more at meetings and events, in boardrooms and to post-graduate students about innovation. In this increasingly engineering-minded world people frequently ask me for tips on how to get innovation going.
Some of the ideas people put forward are:
“How about an idea box?”
“How about canvassing ideas for a new product design from our customers?”
“How about rewarding our engineers with a profit share if they design a new product?”
However, the truth is that many manufacturing enterprises, especially the smaller ones, are too narrowly sliced into specific functions. They are mimicking large organisations and by doing so are giving up any flexibility and resilience that they might have had. Designers design, manufacturers manufacture and salesmen sell. This functional division of their hierarchy makes information flows about potential improvements, new market opportunities and some old tricks that could become useful again very difficult. The cost of coordination in these enterprises is very high. In these silo-based organisations the cost of finding information, new signals and new ideas from outside the organisations is extremely high, and in general they struggle to learn. Why I mention them is that innovation is something that most organisations are already doing, they just do not recognise it as such. Innovation is lost within functions, or is overlooked because a project is focusing on addressing some or other need. Every improvement project could also be used to change or improve the culture of innovation, to deepen the use of knowledge and to increase capabilities and options for an uncertain future.
A second problem is that most smaller manufacturers are mainly focused on product innovation. Which does not mean being focused on knocking the socks off their customers with frequent improvements or brilliant designs. Unfortunately, many of the more traditional manufacturers are focused on how to reduce the price or how to sort out quality issues. This is actually a kind of process improvement, but a very narrow one. The limitation of this incremental approach is that you can at best only grow and develop as fast as your customers can articulate what they want. Competitors or substitutes can also upset market relations by coming up with novel solutions that an incremental approach struggles to generate.
A third problem is that innovation is only carried out when customers demand it. It is passive. It functions in bursts to get things right, and then it settles into a problem-solving mode until the next customer makes some unreasonable demands. One should be grateful when clients give you a piece of their mind, but this is still far too passive to my way of thinking.
What many manufacturers lack, especially those in the more traditional sectors such as metals and engineering, is a focused effort by top management to build a culture of innovation that is actively trying to find product, process and business model improvements. The effort must be focused internally in order to constantly rethink the business and its core processes, and at the same time it must be focused externally on what customers and competitors are doing. The really good companies are also looking beyond current markets and competitors at new technologies and how they might shape the future.
Thus far I have addressed the business perspective. However, research organisations, technology transfer centres and industry support centres can also become trapped in a low-innovation culture.
I am currently working with a few industry groups and research and technology centres to find out how these organisations can move beyond the “catching up” and responding to change modes towards anticipating what will come next. This sounds perfectly simple, but by merely mobilising more and more people in the organization to search for what’s next has already yielded amazing results in a short time. Perhaps I am being over-optimistic, but I can already sense the innovation culture change in these organisations as more and more people become involved in searching for possibilities.
Here’s an apt quote attributed to William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”.
The first kind of search is to get more people involved in searching for what is already present within the organisation, but is not recognised or is not being used to transform the organisation. The second kind of search is to go beyond the organisation in related and unrelated markets and technologies. Take trends such as the global shift to automation, or the new developments in artificial intelligence and play with these within your organisation. Wonder out loud with your people about what this might mean for the organisation, for clients, for suppliers. How might these technologies or trends influence their investment decisions, their viability or their business models? Use these vague concepts to rethink the organisation, its networks, its technologies and systems.
That is what I call instigating innovation, when the dialogue led by the leadership mobilises more and more people within and outside the organisations to start thinking creatively, connectedly and in new ways about the future and the present. Lay a strong foundation for innovation by getting more people to think, imagine, connect ideas and improve.
I have been developing a new capacity building method and training approach that brings together my work in innovation systems promotion and my work on improving technology and innovation management. I call it “Instigating Innovation”.
I chose “instigating” because it has a more positive ring to it than provocation or incitement. While it is a noun with mainly a positive tone, it is a bit more aggressive than support, enable or encourage or even stimulating. I have been referred to in my past as an instigator of change so I thought this was a good idea.
Why was this effort firstly necessary and secondary so rewarding?
My work on innovation systems is mainly aimed at assisting meso-organizations such as technology transfer centres, research centres and universities to be more responsive to the needs of the private sector. While it only takes a few interviews by a senior decision maker from one of these institutions to a few leading enterprises to get the organization to improve its offering to the private sector, it does not solve the problem that these institutions often needs a continuous process of innovation itself. So while they can respond to the needs of the enterprises (for instance by launching a new service, or making a key technology available, etc), they often are not able to innovate constantly in order to anticipate what they private sector might need in the future.
With my other hat on, working in the private sector to improve the management of technology and innovation is focused on helping individual and on rare occasions, groups or networks of enterprises to formalize or improve their management of innovation. Here my challenge is that most enterprises innovate by accident, or have elements of an innovation management approach in place without knowing it. But it is not systematic nor is it consistent.
So both supporting institutions and enterprises lack some very basic frameworks to focus their existing development and learning processes to ensure not only short term results (new products & services, process improvements, cost reduction, etc) but to also ensure longer term success (playing in the right markets, selecting the right technologies, investing in the right kind of knowledge, partnering with the right people, etc). Furthermore, most enterprises and supporting institutions have something else in common: they often face resource constraints with the most versatile of their staff being involved in problem solving and not thinking about the future and what may be possible sometime down the line.
I set aside most of March and had great fun reading through my collection of articles, books, reports of past missions, and speaking to entrepreneurs and development practitioners I trust. Based on this investigation I decided on the following criteria for instruments to include in the Instigating Innovation module:
Each instrument or concept must be relevant to both enterprises and meso-level organizations
Each instrument must provide a very simple framework that can be illustrated on a flipchart
The simple framework must be usable as a workshop format that allows people to reorganize or explore their current and future practices
The frameworks must be scalable, both in depth (allowing pointers for a deep dive into an issue) and in width (useable for a product, issue, portfolio or the strategy of the organization as a whole).
Lastly, I did not want to be the consultant with a project, I want to be the facilitator that enables change and that builds long term sustainability into the organizations that I work with.
This was a very rewarding exercise. Not only do I love reading about innovation, change and technology, I love finding better ways to explain these concepts. It was also great to find a way to connect my work on innovation systems, which often seems abstract, with the tough decisions that the enterprises that I work with must confront and address. I tend to work in the more technical domains dominated by academics, engineers, scientists and manufacturers, so finding a simple yet convincing way to add value to what these clever people do was important.
I will in the next few posts reveal a little bit more of the tools I selected and how it can be used.
Thank you for the EDA team in Bosnia and Herzegovina who motivated me to turn this idea into a capacity building format and who agreed that I try “Instigating Innovation” on their team during my visit to Banja Luka in May 2015!
Instigating Innovation in Banja Luka with the team from EDA
Marcus and I have just posted a new article on the Systemic Insight website. The post is about our recent article that was published in the IDS Bulletin (Vol 46.3) and is titled “Explore, Scale Up, Move Out: Three Phases to Managing Change under Conditions of Uncertainty”.
Please note that in future all my posts specifically about complexity and resilience will be published on our Systemic Insight website. To my regular blog readers it may be worthwhile to also subscribe to the feed on that site. We promise to write more often now that the foundation for our applied research theme on complexity in development has been created. We already have many customers using our approaches and this area of work is promising and rewarding. We have added a new page to the Systemic Insight site that explains some of our most frequently asked about services related to complexity thinking applied to development.
On this site I will keep on writing about Private Sector Development in general, and particularly on innovation and innovation systems.
Your feedback, comments, emails, phone calls, tweets and likes are appreciated. Let us know what you think and what you would like to discuss, read about or just “air”.
This is the 5th post on building technological capability. I have written many posts before on the environment in which innovation and technological capability development takes place, so this will only be a short summary.
In this perspective, we investigate how various regulatory and environmental factors shape the behaviour of enterprises. It combines the meta level (sociocultural) and macro level (generic framework conditions) of the systemic competitiveness framework (Esser et al., 1995).
Specifically, we seek to establish whether or not firms have to innovate through the incentives created in the broader environment. Firms’ innovative efforts are not usually the result of enthusiasm for innovation but the outcome of necessity – firms have to innovate because their competitors are innovating too, and because they will get forced out of the market if they do not innovate. In turn, this means that firms that are experiencing little competitive pressure will often not be inclined to put much effort into innovation, which is perfectly rational as innovation always involves cost and risk. It is important to note that the enabling environment is not only a function of different kinds of government policy, it is also affected by private sector policies such as decisions to collectively invest, collude and compete.
While some of these issues can be identified through desktop research, interviews with key industry leaders or experts will quickly reveal which socioeconomic factors affect the investment and experimentation appetite of the business sector.
A second dimension relates to the incentives for other actors in the system to support the development of technological capability in formal and informal institutions. For instance, national-level policies direct universities to offer particular kinds of courses, but do they provide the incentive for academics to develop teaching or research programmes that improves the capacity of enterprises or innovators?
Hint: I have learned that when interviewing entrepreneurs to understand their perspective on the innovation system (a.k.a the technological system) around them, never to start with the regulatory environment and the broader environmental factors. You will hear a million reasons why the whole system is conspiring against entrepreneurs to be competitive, innovative and optimistic.
In the end it is not about the presence of entrepreneurs, institutions that enable knowledge to flow, institutions that address persistent market failure, or an supportive framework conditions. While all of these matters, it is about how they interact. A checklist approach will not work. Having a university or a few innovative enterprises does not guarantee that a society or community has institutionalized technological capability. Technological capability is about the dynamism between these different factors, it is about relationships, spill-overs and trust. These are only created over time as a result of positive interaction between individuals, organizations, both formally and informally.
This is the 3rd post in the series on building technological capability.
Contrary to common belief, building technological capability does not start with eduction. That being said, education matters and certainly makes any upgrading effort much easier. It is not only about the basic qualifications, but also about the ease with which existing employees can further their education.
With education institutions we include all forms of education, from basic to technical, vocational to post tertiary education. We also include public as well as private providers of education. Education lays an important basis with regards to skills, but also increases the absorptive capacity of a society. Advanced forms of education includes research.
In general, when we assess the role of education in assisting enterprises or industries to upgrade, we want to know how responsive the education system (broadly speaking) is. If a new standard is agreed upon in industry, how long does it take for the technical Universities to include this in their programmes? If a new disruptive innovation takes place, how fast is the curriculum updated? I remember back in the 90s when I studied for the first time, how the software we used at the university was no longer available commercially. Fortunately, all those Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts still worked on Excel, I still use it today 😉
While the responsiveness of the education sector is important, what is ideal is a education system that not only responds to the needs of the private sector, but it preempts or anticipates what is needed next. This is very important for the manufacturing sector. Graduates must know not only what is now mainstream, but also what is expected or coming soon. This is where large parts of our South African university system lags behind. But this is not unique to South Africa.
A last point I want to make about the education sector is that it is also important to understand the role and contribution of the private sector to the education sector. In many countries there is a close relationship between the private sector and for instance universities. Companies contribute to to not only basic education infrastructure, they often fund research positions and projects. An industry that is complaining that they don’t get from the education sector what they need is most likely also not contributing through finances or advice.
This is the second post in this series about building technological capability. I believe that this technological capability is best developed by an innovation systems approach with a particular view on emergent properties of the system. I have written before about the importance of taking a business perspective on an innovation system here and here. In the previous post I explained our concept of technological capability. I argued that one of the elements of technological capability is “The skill of the producers to imitate and innovate at product, process and business model levels. This is largely dependent on pressure to compete as well as pressure to collaborate with each other”.
In this post I will look a little deeper into this ability to innovate, collaborate and competition. For the remainder of this post I will take the perspective as a knowledge broker (or facilitator) working with an technology transfer center responsible to promote the upgrading and modernization of a sector.
One of the challenges of promoting an innovation system is that the technological capability in the private sector is not easy to see. Often we have to use proxy indicators such as exports to determine whether our industries are innovative and competitive. But export figures does not tell the whole story.
While the physical attributes of a product or component could tell us something about the sophistication of the product and the process behind it, even a simple metal component could be the result of an extremely sophisticated process that combines different knowledge domains, technological capabilities, materials (combining metallurgy and sand for instance in a foundry) and enterprises. Even if you have access to the premises, the tacit knowledge, experience and networks that are accessed to make a product is not always detectable.
Not only is it hard to determine what companies are able to do, it is also difficult to figure out what they cannot do. The fact that a manufacturer three years ago developed a successful product is not a guarantee that they can still do this. The finding that a particular function or technology is not present in an enterprise does not mean that they do not have access to this technology when they need it. When the entrepreneurs claim that they lack finance to do innovation this is often merely describing a symptom.
Enterprises that are able to adapt, change and improve not only their products but also their processes and business models are essential for any economy. This is about competition, but it is also about unlocking the capability of individuals, being more responsible with resources, and being responsible within a broader socio economic environment.
Finding ways to get enterprises to collaborate is very important for the health and dynamics of an innovation system. At the same time, stimulating competitiveness, not only at the level of price, but in terms of alternative approaches to solve a problem or in terms of different ideas and concepts is necessary. Often business associations and industry bodies are good with some limited collaboration, for instance on advocacy, but not so good at stimulating new (competing) ideas, approaches, models and solutions.
For a broker or intermediary it is still possible to move between and into enterprises to find opportunities for improvement. I am often amazed at how hesitant universities, technology intermediaries and research centres are to
Searching for opportunities for collaboration
embrace this privilege of being able to move around in an industry to see what is possible and what constraints or barriers to innovation exists. I will expand on that in a future post in this series.
For enterprises to find out what other enterprises can or cannot do is a lot more difficult. Firstly, by asking somebody if they can or cannot do something might give them a hint that a specific opportunity exists. Secondly, many companies do not like their competitors on their premises. Thirdly, there are many risks and costs associated with working with a competitor. Lastly, there is a risk that a competitor is able to exploit a joint opportunity better and thus gain more prominence in the market.
The ability of enterprises to find opportunities to work together is important as a means of reducing costs and gaining access to resources that individual enterprises cannot afford independently. For instance, skills development, joint marketing efforts are quite easy to cooperate on.
However, on issues such as joint research and development, procuring scarce and sophisticated equipment, or collaborating in a more intensive way such as a cluster often require an external broker. Often this kind of brokerage is hard to organize at the level of enterprises. Industry associations, Universities, technology intermediaries of government programmes aimed at industry promotion must step in. This is where I earn my bread and butter as many industry support programmes are ill-equipped to diagnose, articulate and facilitate these kind of firm level collaboration processes as part of improving an innovation system.
Let me bring all of this together. Enterprises that are striving to improve their performance, their value add and their overall competitive offering are an important element in an innovation system. These enterprises are expected to compete with each other, not just on price, but with different approaches, solutions and concepts. At the same time, we expect to see that these enterprises cooperate or collaborate on issues where there are benefits to do so. The dynamic of how enterprises interact with each other (collaborating and competing) is a direct contributor to the technological capability of a region, an industry or an economy. Where enterprises are not able to work together and at the same time compete with one another, a key ingredient to the technological capability is weakened. It is not always possible for enterprises to formulate or develop opportunities for collaborating due to many risks, costs and the difficulties associated with forming the cooperation concepts. This is a technology related market failure that sometimes can only be overcome by a broker-like service of Meso-level institutions such as technology intermediaries or education institutions.
This is the fourth post in this series about building technological capability.
In 2011 I explained how we define technology in a broad way. This definition looks beyond hardware to include knowledge and organization of the different elements. For instance, if a company decides to achieve a new standard of compliance, that is seen as a technology. This technology involves the way processes are organized, the knowledge of how to achieve and maintain this new standard, and the physical and knowledge infrastructure involved in the enterprise.
Firms depend on a variety of public and private technology institutions in order to compete, innovate and grow. Examples range from access to basic research all the way to access to technical problem solving. The measurement, standards, testing and quality assurance (MSTQ) of a country is also assessed from this perspective. The density of interaction between various technology institutions, as well as the interaction between the firms and the technology institutions, is an important factor in the innovation trends in a sector. Various kinds of technical services such as knowledge-intensive business services play an important role in knowledge spill-overs between different firms.
We call all these carriers of technological knowledge “technological institutions”. While some of these institutions are publicly funded (like a research centre, national standards organization or an start-up incubator), some could also be privately funded (like a supply chain development office at a multinational, a specialized equipment provider that provides training and technical support, etc). Specialist and technical service providers, management consultants, researchers and manufacturing extension experts all fall under this broad category. Some charge full service, others provide public goods, but all disseminate knowledge to enterprises.
An organization like a Technology Transfer Centre hosted by a University is located between an Education Institution (post 3 in this series) and a Technological Institution, and often it behaves like both. The Technology Stations Programme in South Africa is an example of an institution designed to fit the space between technological intermediaries, universities and enterprises.
It is noticeable that in many developing countries, the technological institutions that disseminate technological knowledge and that makes scarce technology available to industry are weak or missing. While some stronger enterprises may require and be able to absorb more technological knowledge, the domestic institutions often provide generic services that do not meet the expectations of these leading enterprises. In middle income countries, leading enterprises may simply disengage from the domestic technological institutions and engage with service provided in other countries, further reducing the scale of knowledge dissemination and weakening the system further. This leads to a situation where most enterprises in the country only have access to generic and low-value services, while leading companies and multinationals connect with global sources of knowledge and technology.
You may be surprised to find out which organizations are identified by enterprises if you asked them where they receive technological and specialized knowledge from. I typically ask “who do you turn to when you get stuck?”. In most cases, equipment suppliers, engineers employed by larger companies, or a junior lecturer with high levels of enthusiasm are identified as the most important sources of knowledge or technological advice. I have found this same pattern in many countries, the most important carriers of knowledge are not formal organizations, but individuals.
The result is that the cost of finding knowledge, or gaining access to scarce technology is high, and that those with broader networks are most likely able to gain access to this important resource while those that depend on public goods or generally available information are unable to access the necessary information.
I will explain in a future post how we can diagnose and improve the domain of technological institutions in order to improve the technological capability of enterprises.
In the next few posts I will focus on building technological capability in developing countries. I am specifically thinking of Sub-Saharan Africa as I write these posts, but I am sure that some of the ideas will be relevant to my colleagues working in other parts of the world.
What do I mean with technological capability? We see technological capability as going beyond what firms can do, to what societies or parts of society can use or do with technology. It is a capability that is manifest in products and processes, but that arise from a capacity to match a problem or opportunity with technological systems, sub-systems or combinations of systems. This means that technological capability is not only about technological skills (for instance in knowing how to combine different technologies, or what the latest advances are), but also has business and networking skills to identify and recognize opportunities, discover what solutions can fit the context and constraints (like performance specifications, prices, volumes) and how to organize supply, delivery and maintenance. It thus combines all the elements of innovation including product knowledge (understanding components, sub-systems, architectures), process knowledge as well as business knowledge.
To build technological capability in a country or an industry is the result of an ongoing search process where networks of businesses, academia and government officials search for what is possible at reasonable value and margins, what can and what cannot be done within the local context. What can and cannot be done in the local context is a complex issue that is affected by four factors that I will briefly outline below. It is not only an engineering design problem, and it is not only about products and patents. It is not about a lack of knowledge or a lack of PhDs and engineering students. There are several things that must be worked on at the same time but a whole range of actors working towards different goals.
In many instances the public sector is more eager to develop domestic technological capability than the private sector itself. The private sector in Sub Saharan Africa is in most countries fragmented, and search costs as well as coordination costs at the level of products, processes and networks are very high. That is why those that can afford to take risks and that can afford to take a long term view will most certainly benefit disproportionately to those who are driven by short term profits. For instance, local manufacturers of components that invest very little to nothing in R&D cannot be expected to compete in the long run with international or regional competitors who are investing in R&D.
My late friend and business partner, Jorg Meyer-Stamer argued that there are four pillars [1] that technological capability is built on:
The skill of the producers to imitate and innovate at product, process and business model levels. This is largely dependent on pressure to compete as well as pressure to collaborate with each other;
The economic, political, administrative and legal framework conditions, which determine whether incentives to develop technological capability exist. In the past, it was often not recognised that these incentives do not exist in many developing countries, especially if an import substitution policy relieved companies of all pressure to be competitive or to innovate;
Direct support by technology-oriented state institutions or specific types of knowledge intensive service companies – depending on the given development level, the competition situation and the characteristics of a technology branch in the given country. These organizations disseminate technical and expert knowledge between different actors, knowledge domains and industries and play a critical role in the use of and application of tacit and explicit knowledge;
Indirect support by the public and private educational system; in addition to a sound basic education it is important that technical training of a suitable quantity and quality is available at the secondary-school level and also in the universities. The private sector often plays a role in short term training aimed at particular technology applications. Overall the responsiveness of the education sector in identifying and responding to changes in how technology is applied, developed or used in society.
The close interaction between these four pillars creates technological capability. Thus technological capability differs between countries and even within countries because the context differs. A single firm may in the short to medium term manage to get a sophisticated product into the market, but to sustain its position it will sooner or later need to tap into the education system, the knowledge networks of intermediaries and technology experts, or in supplier networks. Technological capability is not measured at the level of patents or products developed (this does not measure the system, it measures a single firm), but is best measured at the level of regional or international competitiveness of industries, entrance of new domestic and international competitors, and exports.
What developing countries fail to achieve is to crowd in many firms and industry networks by creating public goods that intensifies competition and that force firms to collaborate on critical issues like skills development, the development of industry specific infrastructure, etc. Despite being a big buyer in many countries, procurement patterns, priorities and performance criteria are not available to domestic producers (until it is too late). The education sector is mainly funded to provide basic and undergraduate education along strict disciplines, not to constantly upgrade the existing workforce to cope with technological shifts and the integration of different knowledge bases. Universities are funded to do research at a product or process level, not to do applied research that will modernize industries. The importance of various networks of technological intermediaries and knowledge providers are overlooked.
The private sector must also shoulder some blame. Industry bodies are often mainly focused on advocating for favorable conditions to protect existing investment or interests, not on increasing local supplier networks or building industries. Firms would often rather collude than collaborate. Industry associations are typically organized via traditional sub-sector structures, while global production is becoming more integrated, multi-disciplinary and application orientated.
In closing, technological capability is not only created through policy. It is not created through industrial or innovation policy, although it helps. It is not created by individual champion firms, although this certainly makes it easier. Technological capability is built as a result of an innovation system where the context matters. Firms able to manage their own internal technology and innovation are essential, but these typical arise out of public funded investment into technology intermediaries, management capability and the overall performance in the education sector. It is not possible to increase the technological capability of a group of firms in a particular industry without looking at the broader context where the four areas outlined earlier shape the outcomes in the medium to long term.
From my experience in assisting to promote technological capability in developing countries an ongoing facilitation effort funded by the public sector AND the private sector is needed to broker collaboration, but also to look at ways that local demand can be met by the broader system in the long term. In many countries and industries the best host for such a process is a technology intermediary attached to an university or a development programme, with a mandate to build networks around local opportunities that is not only about engineering, but also about reducing the costs of finding opportunities, suppliers and suitable technologies.
Notes
1 – These four pillars later became the foundation of the RALIS methodology that we use to diagnose and improve innovation systems.
