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.
Gaining a deeper understanding of an innovation system and how to build technological capability is not rocket science. I propose that you start with understanding the enterprise perspective on collaboration on competition first (post 1 and 2 in this series), then continue to better understand the relationship between formal education and the industry (post 3), then the creators and disseminators of informal and technical knowledge (post 2) and only then ask about the regulatory systems and the environmental factors.
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.