Revitalising African agriculture through innovative business models and organisational arrangements : promising developments in the traditional crops sector.

Within the last four years, a number of high profile reports outlining new strategies for pulling African agriculture out of its current impasse have emerged. These include the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme of NEPAD, and the InterAcademy Council Report commissioned by UN Secretary General Koffi Annan. Whilst these strategies are a welcome improvement on those that have characterised African agriculture in the past, it is argued here that like their predecessors, they fail to focus on business-competitive approaches as an integral part of the reform package needed to stimulate African agricultural productivity and development. This paper draws on innovation, business and organisation literature to highlight some of these approaches. It focuses on three concepts : value innovation, lead user focus and organisational value logic

Industry Equilibrium with Open Source and Proprietary Firms

We present a model of industry equilibrium to study the coexistence of Open Source (OS) and Proprietary (P) firms. Two novel aspects of the model are: (1) participation in OS arises as the optimal decision of profit-maximizing firms, and (2) OS and P firms may (or may not) coexist in equilibrium. Firms decide their type and investment in R&D, and sell packages composed of a primary good (like software) and a complementary private good. The only difference between both kinds of firms is that OS share their technological advances on the primary good, while P keep their innovations private. The main contribution of the paper is to determine conditions under which OS and P coexist in equilibrium. Interestingly, this equilibrium is characterized by an asymmetric market structure, with a few large P firms and many small OS firms.Industry Equilibrium, Open Source, Innovation, Complementarity, Technology Sharing, Cooperation in R&D

Korea and the global software industry

노트 : Final Report to the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agenc

Technology development in the new millennium

Available in PDF from the MIT Japan Program Website."Date of publication: May 28, 2001"--T.p. verso. "MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives"--Cover.Includes bibliographical references.Barry Naughton and Adam Segal

Exports, university-industry linkages, and innovation challenges in Bangalore, India

The success of the Indian software industry is now internationally recognized. Consequently, scholars, policymakers, and industry officials everywhere generally anticipate the increasing competitiveness of India in high technology activities. Using a structural framework, the author argues that Bangalore's (and India's) information technology (IT) industry is predicated on an Indian business model which does not encourage thick institutional linkages such as those encapsulated by the triple helix model. Under this institutional arrangement there is cross-fertilization of new ideas and new modes of institutional interaction between industry, academia, and government. Though there are several hundred IT businesses in a milieu of numerous engineering and science colleges and high-end public sector research institutes, the supposed thick institutional architecture is in reality quite thin. This is due to a particular type of an export-oriented model which is based on off-shore development of software services, targeted mainly to the United States. Neither domestic market nor non-U.S. markets such as East Asia are pursued aggressively by Indian firms, which offer alternative forms of learning. Consequently, Bangalore's dynamism in the IT industry stems from linear and extensive growth rather than nonlinear and intensive growth. The author argues that Bangalore has serious innovation challenges with weak university-industry linkages, lack of inter-firm collaboration, and the absence of cross-fertilization between the knowledge-intensive defense/public sector and the commercial IT industry. To strengthen Bangalore's and India's innovation system, the Indian business model must be reformed by diversifying geographical and product markets, stemming international and internal brain drain, and contributing to urban infrastructure.ICT Policy and Strategies,Technology Industry,Tertiary Education,Information Technology,Educational Technology and Distance Education

Innovation and Diffusion

The contribution made by innovation and new technologies to economic growth and welfare is largely determined by the rate and manner by which innovations diffuse throughout the relevant population, but this topic has been a somewhat neglected one in the economics of innovation. This chapter, written for a handbook on innovation, provides a historical and comparative perspective on diffusion that looks at the broad determinants of diffusion, economic, social, and institutional, viewed from a microeconomic perspective. A framework for thinking about these determinants is presented along with a brief nontechnical review of modeling strategies used in different social scientific literatures. It concludes with a discussion of gaps in our understanding and potential future research questions.

Research on Markets for Inventions and Implications for R&D Allocation Strategies

Several streams of literature have examined the phenomenon of “markets for inventions”, that is, the trade of elements of knowledge which are “disembodied” from individuals, organizations, and products. The aims of this paper are to bring together the various streams of research in this area and discuss their major assumptions and limitations, in order to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the phenomenon, and identify promising paths for future research. We start our review by identifying the object of market exchange—that is, an invention whose knowledge has been codified and disembodied from individuals, organizations, or artifacts. We then identify those factors that enable firms to trade inventions, distinguishing between institutional-, firm-, and industry-level factors. We close our analysis of the extant literature by discussing the implications of markets for inventions for firm behavior and performance. Against this background, we highlight an important avenue for future research. A neglected implication of the development of invention markets is that firms are confronted with a wide variety of technological paths from which to choose, because the opportunity to acquire technologies on the market offers them a greater variety that can their internal R&D departments. However, the streams of research on markets for inventions and on R&D allocation strategies have been surprisingly disconnected so far. Hence, in the final section, we start to establish and explore the link between these literatures, and to identify a research agenda in this domain