Remedial Education for Black Children in Rural South Africa: An Exploration of Success Using Evolutionary Innovation Theory

remedial, South Africa, rural

Why People Contribute Voluntarily to Innovation: Insights from South Africa 's Siyabuswa Educational Improvement & Development Trust

Innovation, South Africa

A sub-sector approach to cost-benefit analysis: Small-scale sisal processing in Tanzania

project appraisal; cost-benefit analysis, sisal decorticating technology,rural innovations

What drives innovativeness in industrial clusters? Transcending the debate

Industrial clusters, Regional agglomerations, Technological learning

Technology support for small industries in developing countries : a review of concepts and project practices

The paper is a review of approaches towards technology support for small-scale manufacturing enterprises in developing countries since the early 1970s. Early programmes tended to suffer from a number of weaknesses, emanating from a limited conceptualisation of technology and an inadequate understanding of the role of the small-scale sector in industrial development more broadly. There was also a lack of practical experience with project implementation. However, in recent years important advancements have been made on all these fronts. Four features of recent technology assistance programmes that have tended to be associated with success are discussed and illustrated with evidence from three projects. Broadly, successful projects (a) embrace the notion that durable competitiveness of small producers in a competitive economic environment requires that they develop internal capabilities to effectively asssimilate, use, and adapt product and process technologies; (b) are demand-driven; (c) target the assistance to groups of producers with common interests and problems, and help them to organise themselves in collective bodies that can evolve into selfhelp institutions; and that (d) design appropriate incentive structures based on market principles

Explaining innovativeness in small high-technology firms in the United Kingdom

The paper is an exploration of sources of innovativeness of high-technology small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SME) in South East England. A range of indicators of innovative performance and potentially important explanatory factors are constructed, and the links between them analysed statistically. Some indicators are experimental and more fine-grained than conventional measures. Explanatory factors internal and external to the firms are considered, and innovativeness-enhancing effects associated with geographical proximity of external factors are investigated. The results point to the importance of science institutions, as well as other agents whose capabilities are complementary to what the SMEs themselves possess. However, there is no support for the current policy fashion of promoting clusters of SME in similar lines of business

Irreversible social change

In this paper we evaluate how irreversible social change should be evaluated from an ethical perspective. First; we analyse the notion of irreversibility in general terms. We define a general notion of what makes a change irreversible; drawing on discussions in ecology and economics. This notion is relational in the sense; that it claims that a change can only be irreversible for a certain party. Second; we examine ways to evaluate irreversible changes; drawing on discussions from both ethics; particularly the Capability Approach; and economics; particularly Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Safe Minimum Standard. Insights from the field of development studies are also woven into the discussion. Third; we investigate why (adverse) social changes tend to be systematically undervalued in decision making by private actors and policy makers; and argue for applying the Safe Minimum Standard as a decision rule for dealing with irreversible social changes. Finally; we show how our framework can be applied by evaluating the land acquisition process of biofuel producers in Tanzania

Why people contribute voluntarily to innovation : insights from South Africa's Siyabuswa Educational Improvement & Development Trust

No abstract

Strategic niche management as an operational tool for sustainable innovation : guidelines for practice

Strategic Niche Management provides an evolutionary analytical framework that has proven useful for the analysis of success and failure in the introduction of radical innovations in fields such as wind energy, biomass, public transport systems and food production. However, SNM has yielded few detailed and practical "how to do it" guidelines for practitioners interested in how to incubate new technologies. This paper takes one step towards greater operationalisation of SNM as a practical tool for managing the development of radically new technologies. We consolidate the existing SNM studies to identify the main gaps in that literature. Then we bring in studies on the development and commercialisation of radical innovations in large companies and draw lessons from these with respect to "how to do" radical innovation, shedding new light on the nature of niche-based learning processes that are needed for these innovations to mature. A number of concrete guidelines for implementing the Strategic Niche Development approach are given

What drives innovativeness in industrial clusters? : transcending the debate

The paper throws new light on the debate about the role played by local knowledge spillovers (LKS) as a driver of regional innovative activity. It transcends the regional level of analysis that has been commonly adopted in the literature so far, using insights from the evolutionary theory of the firm. This makes it possible to derive a typology of mechanisms through which regional agglomeration may stimulate learning and innovation. When this typology is brought to bear on the extant approaches in the debate, the contrasting viewpoints can be reconciled to some extent. The main conclusion is that little theoretical ground for the LKS debate remains