Lead Story
Issue No. 41 - June/July 2008
How SA Innovation Stacks Up
by Professor Richard Blandy
Theoretical ideas about innovation go back at least to Adam Smith’s view (Smith, 1776) that increased productivity was associated with specialisation and the division of labour, implying technological advances in processes and organisation. Alfred Marshall (Marshall, 1890) saw specialisation and progress arising out of the external economies associated with the rise of specialist suppliers of goods and services used as inputs in other firms in particular industries giving rise to growing agglomerations. The idea of collaboration among firms (at least as suppliers and demanders) thus starts to emerge as an element in innovation.
Michael Porter (Porter, 1990) gave a spatial dimension to this idea, seeing regional industry clusters emerging as a result of externality-driving innovations produced and introduced by firms in local supply chains.
Philip Cooke, Mikel Landabaso and others from the 1990s to the present - for example, Cooke, 1992; Landabaso, Oughton and Morgan, 1999; Cooke, 2001 - developed the regional dimension in innovation to propose the existence of ‘regional innovation systems’ and ‘learning regions’. Henry Etzkowitz (Etzkowitz, 1997) proposed the evolution of a “triple helix” of interacting players - enterprises, universities and government - sharing and exchanging functions in a knowledge-based economy and society.
Recently, Philip Cooke and Loet Leydesdorff (Cooke and Leydesdorff, 2005) introduced the opportunity for low-cost, long distance interactions as well as in regional networks leading to the idea of “constructed advantage” for a region.
In the middle of this mix lies the Great Depression-inspired work of Joseph Schumpeter (1942). Schumpeter introduced the dynamic concept of “creative destruction” resulting from waves of innovation introduced by business entrepreneurs out of accumulated scientific advances when the economic time was right.
In Schumpeter’s eyes, the businessman is the ...
