Sylvia Schwaag Serger

Professor

Internationalization of Research and Innovation : new policy developments

Författare

Sylvia Schwaag-Serger
Emily Wise

Summary, in English

The forces of globalization and the enabling characteristics of internet communication have impacted the nature of research and innovation. Knowledge and innovation processes are both more dispersed and more openly accessible. In addition, we witness a shift in the global knowledge and innovation geography with both being increasingly generated and developed in regions outside Europe, North America and Japan. Countries, which in some respects are still regarded as being in the early stages of economic development, are increasingly driving global knowledge and innovation development.

To access and make use of globallydispersed knowledge and connect with important innovation hubs in new markets, both public and private sector research activities are internationalising. Universities and other research institutions act to attract and retain the best talent in order to secure stable research financing. Companies act to find the most suitable innovation environments in which to locate to secure skilled personnel and supportive business conditions, as well as access to strategic customers and markets. And different levels of government act to simultaneously build strong, stable hubs that drive economic growth and ensure agile, entrepreneurial global networks
that catalyze continuous renewal.

Policymakers, at regional, national and supranational level, are responding in different ways to the changing knowledge and innovation geography. From the perspective of innovation policy, the challenge is to enable domestic actors to connect to worldleading knowledge and innovation hubs in ways that benefit and strengthen regional and national innovation systems. Policymakers are often expected to encourage internationalization that allows firms and researchers to access worldclass knowledge and strategic markets while at the same time ensuring that value creation resulting from international science and technology cooperation accrues to the domestic constituency.This paper examines how countries respond to the abovedefined challenges by designing strategies and policies aimed at enabling national innovation systems to benefit from the changing global knowledge and innovation geography. By analyzing two surveys and a number of national innovation and internationalization strategies, we are able to identify a number of new trends in policy strategies and types of instruments used to achieve objectives. The comparative analysis highlights an evolving and broadening scope for innovation policy, an increased need for strategic prioritisation of research and innovation investments and collaboration partner targets, and an increased demand for more complex internationalization support services necessitating a deeper engagement of public sector intermediaries. The analysis also highlights a number of policy challenges related to the internationalization of innovation.

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