Re: Systems of innovation

[Bill Rosenberg <w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to those who replied to my query, esp Peter.

Rob's message below is perhaps a symptom of a central point of Peter's article:

"Under the new conditions of global technological convergence, governments have
lost their traditional
instruments for technology policy. The very characteristics that enable
corporate entities to participate in the
global system?their statelessness and permeable boundaries?preclude a role for
government ministries.
Moreover, the rapid dissemination and transplantability of innovation removes
the traditional incentive for
technology policy: the spillover effects that state intervention was intended to
internalize at a national level now
reappear internationally. Not surprisingly, governments have increasingly ceded
the field of technological
innovation to private actors." (p.11)

How true is this for any given innovation: the "rapid dissemination" probably
doesn't happen as quickly as implied, does it?

However I certainly believe that it does happen - judging by the rapidity with
which successful technology firms in New Zealand have been bought out by
transnationals as soon as the success became apparent.

To the extent that it does happen, is preserving some of the spillover not then
a policy target? For example by controls on capital, FDI, IP rights?

Peter's article also suggests that the value of "clusters" of firms as
technology developers (e.g. Silicon Valley) is dissipating. Is that seen in
practice? Or does it just mean that the clusters focus on a more specialised
area of innovation?

Bill

bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> G'day Peter,
>
> You write:
>
> > Right.  I argued in "Actually Existing Globalization" (published in a
> > collection a
> > few years ago) that industrial policy is ultimately understandable
> > only as
> > technology policy, but that the era of national technology (or
> > innovation) systems
> > is largely over.  At the time I reviewed some of the literature pro
> > and con; I
> > think there are some references in my article.  I'll be glad to send
> > an electronic
> > copy to anyone interested.
> >
> > Peter
> >
>
> I've not seen the paper (and I'd really like to ... ), but I'd argue the
> US has exhibited many signs of an almost mercantilist corporatist policy
> approach to optimising intial advantage in IT - pushing TRIPs into the
> Uruguay Round, allowing anti-competitive mergers and such to ensure
> world-beating economies of scope and scale, pressuring the rest of the
> world into abandoning public telecommunications backbones - in fact -
> policy timing, from the AT&T transformation, to fighting off Japanese
> HDTV standards, to the shift of the public/private internet debate in
> the early nineties, to letting the money-rich but opportunity-poor
> BabyBells off the leash in '96, to allowing media monoliths to
> consolidate across media in '02 - well, it all looks like a technology
> policy of sorts - perhaps at a structural (diffusion and control) rather
> than technical (invention and innovation) level (the DoD drove a lot of
> the latter before the end of the space race and Vietnam War occasioned a
> need for civvie market opportunities, in the context of the post '73 dip
> in national competitiveness and national accounts all 'round), but
> arguably a technology policy nevertheless.
>
> Or not?
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.