Facilitating and responding to the emergence of grass-root needs at the local level is also essential. Support to entrepreneurs and local communities should be primarily provided in matching grant forms to facilitate the mobilization of local resources and ownership. It is of primary importance to pay the greatest attention to country specificities, not only in terms of development level, size, and specialization, but also in terms of administrative and cultural traditions. At the global level, major issues need also to be considered and dealt with by appropriate incentives and regulations: the role of foreign direct investment in developing countries' technological development, conditions of technologies' patenting and licensing, the North-South research asymmetry, and brain drain trends.

Innovation drives long-term economic growth. It has a crucial role to play as global economies recover from the current financial crisis. This book examines the role of innovation in developing countries, with a focus on Africa. It investigates innovation systems and their application; the key role of knowledge in innovation for development; and the importance of comparable country studies and official statistics on innovation. It stresses the need for innovation to become part of a comprehensive development agenda, and makes recommendations for promoting activities in both the formal and informal sectors, with the aim of transforming agriculture into a knowledge-based industry capable of stimulating economic growth. Innovation and the Development Agenda is an important component of the overall OECD Innovation Strategy, which seeks to create stronger and more sustainable growth, while addressing the key global challenges of the 21st century. It is also part of the Innovation, Technology, and Society programme of IDRC. For more information about the OECD Innovation Strategy, see www.oecd.org/innovation/strategy. For more information on IDRC programmes, see www.idrc.ca.

Development and the ending of mass poverty require a massive increase in productive capabilities and production in developing countries. Some countries, notably in Asia, are achieving this. Yet ‘pro-poor’ aid policies, especially for the least developed countries, operate largely without reference to policy thinking on the promotion of innovation for productivity growth. Conversely, policy-makers and researchers on innovation and industrial policies tend to know little about the potential for social protection to support innovation and productivity improvement. This book aims to focus attention on this gulf between research on innovation and on poverty reduction and to identify some of its policy consequences; to set out some ways in which this gulf can be bridged, analytically and empirically; and to contribute to the creation of an agenda for further research and an understanding of the urgency of the implied rethinking. The first two chapters provide sustained arguments for embedding social policy thinking in much more ‘productivist’ frameworks of thought that focus on raising productivity and employment; and for identifying growth theories that can incorporate satisfactory understandings of innovation and employment upgrading. A set of chapters then tackle these broad themes in the context of health, addressing the interlinked issues of innovation, health inequity and associated impoverishment. The final set of chapters examines the challenge of creating industrial policies that generate both innovation and employment, using and going beyond concepts of systems of innovation.

The editors have succeeded in bringing together an excellent mix of leading scholars and practitioners. No book on the WTO has had this wide a scope before or covered the legal framework, economic and political issues, current and would-be countries and a outlook to the future like these three volumes do. 3000 pages, 80 chapters in 3 volumes cover a very interdiscplinary field that touches upon law, economics and politics.

There are two traditional views of the role of intellectual property (IP) within the field of innovation management: in innovation management research, as an indicator or proxy for innovation inputs or outputs, e.g. patents or licensing income; or in innovation management practice, as a means of protecting knowledge. Exploiting Intellectual Property to Promote Innovation and Create Value argues that whilst both of these perspectives are useful, neither capture the full potential contribution of intellectual property in innovation management research and practice.The management of IP has become a central challenge in current strategies of Open Innovation and Business Model Innovation, but there is relatively little empirical work available. Theoretical arguments and empirical research suggest that from both an innovation policy and management perspective, the challenge is to use IP to encourage risk-taking and innovation, and that a broader repertoire of strategies is necessary to create and capture the economic and social benefits of innovation. This book identifies how intellectual property can be harnessed to create and capture value through exploiting new opportunities for innovation. It is organized around three related themes: public policies for IP; firm strategies for IP; and creating value from IP, and offers insights from the latest research on IP strategies and practices to create and capture the economic and social benefits of innovation.

This study has emerged from an ongoing program of trilateral cooperation between WHO, WTO and WIPO. It responds to an increasing demand, particularly in developing countries, for strengthened capacity for informed policy-making in areas of intersection between health, trade and IP, focusing on access to and innovation of medicines and other medical technologies.

This book investigates the interactions between different shifts in innovation models. It underlines ecological conditions and production intensification in the agriculture sector. In total six innovation processes were analyzed in different countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Haiti, Madagascar and Senegal. The similarities between these case studies are that they all demonstrate that sustainable and sufficient network between actors of the innovation are particularly useful for the development of agricultural innovation systems. The different papers demonstrate that there is a need for more commitment of public policy in innovation processes.

This report reviews the policy mix to support knowledge-based start-ups in six countries in Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

SME's are acknowledged as effective sources of jobs and incomes, gaining an important position in the development agenda, subsequently 'cluster' policies were conceived as a framework to augment the effects of SMEs and to optimize resources used to support them. Based on case studies from Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, this volume examines SME clusters and argues that unless they counteract common problems such as very low wages, poor working conditions, poor quality products and lack or environmental regulation, they will be pushed out of the market and so become unsustainable. This book suggests that the SME clusters currently being stretched should react by 'socially upgrading' in order to improve their innovation capacity, as well as social, environmental and labour standards. It puts forward conceptual frameworks which explain the way firms can upgrade: through markets, interaction among cluster members, through Corporate Social Responsibility and other such public policy, and through the better enforcement of regulation.