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National systems of innovation

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Abstract

The perhaps broadest approach to economic performance at the level of a country is the concept of national systems of innovation. Despite the emergence of a compelling literature identifying the persistence of innovative activities and country specific institutional effects, evidence on the nature of national systems of innovation is still missing and a number of crucial questions and answers remain unanswered. To shed light on these issues, as of leading scholars of entrepreneurship and innovation was assembled from around the world for a conference on “National Systems of Entrepreneurship and Innovation” at the ZEW Mannheim in November 2014. This article draws on the NSI framework, sets it in a larger context, examines the logic of the approach and introduces the special issue by summarizing the papers presented at the conference and selected for this special issue.

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Notes

  1. Quote from Link (2015a, p. 3).

  2. The ‘National Systems of Entrepreneurship (NSE) fits in the broader ecosystem literature, as well as, trying to understand exactly what the concept means. The concept of NSE (Acs et al. 2014, 479) introduced entrepreneurship into Nelson’s National Systems of Innovation (NSI). The concept of NSE is new and a special issue in Small Business Economic Journal explores its applications to the broader subject. Both NSE and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems are about institutions, agency and place and the policy issue emerges as to the ‘Strategic Management of Place’ (Audretsch 2015) or what Acs et al. (2014) call the system. What is the strategic management of place if not the management of entrepreneurial ecosystems and systems of innovation?

  3. Lundvall (2005) provides a brief reflection on the origin and use of the national innovation system concept in terms of theory and practice.

  4. In other words, NSI helped us understand where we were as nations but not how to improve our position. It is perhaps a little surprising, if not ironic, that although the NSI literature was heavily influenced by the Schumpeterian tradition, the entrepreneur remained conspicuously absent in this literature. This is considered in the NSE framework.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Zoltán J. Acs

  2. School of Public and Environmental Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1315 E. Tenth St., Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    David B. Audretsch

  3. Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Augsburg, Universitätsstr. 16, 86159, Augsburg, Germany

    Erik E. Lehmann

  4. ZEW – Centre for European Economic Research Mannheim, L 7, 1, 68161, Mannheim, Germany

    Georg Licht

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  1. Zoltán J. Acs
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  4. Georg Licht
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Correspondence to Erik E. Lehmann.

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Acs, Z.J., Audretsch, D.B., Lehmann, E.E. et al. National systems of innovation. J Technol Transf 42, 997–1008 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-016-9481-8

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