Description
Book SynopsisThe economic analysis of innovation is important because economic growth in highly industrialized countries and international competitiveness are driven by innovations and technological change. At the same time, marked nation-specific features exist in the structure of innovative activities and in innovative success. For the study of these national characteristics, the concept of national innovation systems constitutes a powerful and widely applied inter-disciplinary framework in modern innovation theory. This book illuminates this concept from different perspectives. Starting from fundamental conceptual and theoretical issues, it describes and discusses the main development lines of the approach of national innovation systems, and goes on to illustrate an empirical application of this branch of research, offering a new alternative for the quantitative comparative study of national innovation systems.
This book will be of great interest to economists, scholars and policymakers dealing with innovation, technology, research and development, national innovation systems and international competitiveness.
Trade Review‘An Economic Analysis of Innovation
by Markus Balzat offers a comprehensive account of the varieties of research in National Innovations Systems (NIS) and extends the field of analysis by considering NIS performance. Reviewing the theoretical foundations and building blocks of NIS, the requirement of a comparative account of NIS becomes obvious. The sheer complexity of NIS however has, as yet, allowed only descriptive comparisons. Balzat complements and extends those existing approaches by quantitative benchmarking - looking at NIS in a modular way and providing detailed as well as general assessments of their respective performance. This comparison, obviously being of interest in its own right, additionally provides us with an improved way of understanding the conditions and elements of systemic innovation activities at national levels.' -- Uwe Cantner, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany
Table of ContentsContents: Preface 1. Introduction 2. Explaining Basic Elements of the NIS Concept 3. The Development of the NIS Concept 4. The Specifics and the Usefulness of NIS Benchmarking 5. Development and Application of an NIS Performance Model 6. Summary and Outlook References Index
