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What is innovation how to raise thr trend of innovation

in acountry
The OECD defines innovation as "the introduction of a new or significantly improved product, process,
organisation or marketing method".
Innovation must be harnessed to tackle global problems effectively and efficiently.
Innovation in green technologies, for example, can help us fight climate change without
sacrificing growth. But getting solutions to market will require the right incentives to
spur innovation and development. Fortunately, there is evidence that innovation in
climate change mitigation technologies is accelerating.

Innovation can also help us speed up social improvements in developing countries. It’s a
powerful tool for combating infectious diseases and producing clean drinking water, for
example. The ability to address these increasingly urgent issues depends on stronger
innovation and new forms of international collaboration.

Different global challenges naturally call for different approaches; nevertheless, some
common strategies are emerging to accelerate scientific progress and diffuse innovation
as widely as possible:

 Hw to raise trend of innovation in uk?



 Identifying future opportunities and threats

 Assessment of innovation performance will reveal the pattern of current strengths and
weaknesses and perhaps give some idea of how this pattern may change in the future.
However, policy making also needs to take account of how the world may be changing and
how it may continue to change in the future. One source of change will be developments in
science and technology. The main procedures for examining possible future changes in S&T
and their possible economic and social impact are foresight processes and technology
assessment. Particular emphasis will need to be placed on where changes in S&T create new
markets and opportunities for the country concerned and where they may threaten existing
areas of commercial and economic strength. The scope for new S&T to address human,
environmental, social and security problems should also receive close examination. The
underlying behaviour of firms and other actors closely involved in the innovation process
may also change. For example changes are occurring in the organisation and motivation of
corporate research which may require changes in the rationale and orientation of
governments support for this activity.1 Changes in the life cycle of sectors and technologies
and in other areas of government policy need to be taken into account as do changes in the
nature of the global economic system. Analysis of wider economic, political and social
change may require the use of some kind of scenario analysis.

 Formulating innovation policy: top-down and bottom-up


approaches
 An analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) within the
framework provided by the national innovation system (NIS) approach provides a basis on
which a strategic innovation policy can be formulated. Policy makers need to address the
following questions in each case:

 • What can be achieved by the country building on its existing strengths in innovation
performance? What resources need to be committed and what returns will result? • What
can be gained from eliminating existing weaknesses in performance and does this outweigh
the cost and effort involved? • What opportunities do future developments in S&T offer?
Can these be exploited cost-effectively? • How much of the country’s GDP is at risk from
future developments in S&T and economic and social change generally? What the potential
costs and benefits of trying to counteract these threats? In each case the policy maker needs
to assess what if anything the government needs to do to bring about an economically
and/or socially beneficial outcome and whether there are expected net benefits from
intervention. Given the uncertainty attached to each individual episode of support, a
portfolio approach is desirable. In an ideal world, policy makers would deploy their budget
so as to maximize the effect of the gain to national welfare from improving innovation
performance. In practice this may not be feasible. This is because: • The uncertainty
surrounding the net benefits from a given episode of intervention or support suggests that
policy makers might be sensible to hedge their bets by supporting a range of technologies or
innovation activities. • Given the interaction between one aspect of the innovation process
and another concentrating policy resources on one aspect of innovation and ignoring
weaknesses in another complementary aspect of innovation may yield little net gain to
national welfare. This suggests an adaptive approach to policy making where changes in
policy only partly reflect changes in circumstances and in the assessment of national
performance. The uncertain lags which exist between policy actions and their outcomes also
suggest an element of stability in the mix of innovation support as does the need to avoid
confusing business by too frequent changes. A widespread rationale for government
innovation support stems from market, institutional or systemic failures. Such failures,
because they stem from the nature of innovation itself, tend to affect all OECD countries. As
a result a number of innovation activities tend to be supported in all member countries.
However, in some cases such failures interact with institutional and culture features unique
to the country concerned to produce problems with innovation performance which are
peculiar to that country and perhaps a few others. The main role of market failure in the
formulation of innovation policy should occur as part of the bottom up approach. Policy
proposals are best conceived within a systems-based SWOT approach but the identification
of relevant market failures plays an important role in testing whether proposals are likely to
prove cost-effective. The existence of market failure is not in itself a sufficient justification
for policy action. Analytical techniques have their limits in the context of top-down
approaches to innovation policy. Consultation with those at whom the policy is aimed,
principally but not entirely business, can inform policy makers about issues which cannot
easily be encompassed within the available techniques of analysis. Moreover, an innovation
policy which is understood by, and has commitment from, the other main actors in the inno
vation system is likely to be more effective. On the other hand, the risk of “agency capture” by a
particular group in the innovation community must always be guarded against. In the top-down
approach to policy making, evaluation is often seen as means of informing the policy maker of what
works and what does not. In practice this is a complex task. Programmes which are shown to have
been successful in the past may not work in the future. Programmes which were not successful in
the past may have failed because of some rectifiable flaw in programme design. It is often the details
of evaluations not the headline conclusions which are most valuable to designing policies and
programmes for the future. Top-down policy making offers a means of allocating public resources to
those areas where they can have the greatest impact and is the most appropriate means of
responding to a rapidly changing world. However the effectiveness of individual policies and
programmes depends crucially on the details of their design. Thus it is vital that new policies and
programmes be subject to rigorous ex ante appraisal of their potential effectiveness. This may
sometimes show that a policy option which looked very promising at the strategic level cannot be
implemented cost-effectively after all. Effective policy making requires a combination of top-down
and bottom-up approaches.

 Conclusion:
 we need greater involvement of the private sector, non governmental and
philanthropic organisations;
 we need to build greater capacity for innovation in developing countries, including
through technology transfer; and,
 to do these, we need to devise new financing mechanisms

By investing smart, governments can buffer the downturn, accelerate recovery and lay the foundation
for strong and sustainable growth.

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