This book explores emerging topics in innovation policy for more inclusive and sustainable growth. Building on concrete examples, it develops the concept of experimental innovation policy: Rather than evaluating the effects of a policy at its conclusion, monitoring and feedback are incorporated from the design stage and occur continuously throughout the life of the policy. This approach has the potential to improve policy impact and implementation, as well as the efficiency of public expenditures supporting innovation policy. Experimental policymaking is particularly important for new and emerging innovation domains, where the scope for learning and improvement is the greatest. The book explores three emerging domains of innovation policy: innovative entrepreneurship, green innovation, and propoor or base-of-the-pyramid innovation.

This book explores emerging topics in innovation policy for more inclusive and sustainable growth, building on concrete examples, and develops the notion of experimental innovation policy.

Every company's ability to innovate depends on a process of experimentation whereby new products and services are created and existing ones improved. But the cost of experimentation often limits innovation. New technologies--including computer modeling and simulation--promise to lift that constraint by changing the economics of experimentation. Never before has it been so economically feasible to ask "what-if" questions and generate preliminary answers. These technologies amplify the impact of learning, paving the way for higher R&D performance and innovation and new ways of creating value for customers.In Experimentation Matters, Stefan Thomke argues that to unlock such potential, companies must not only understand the power of experimentation and new technologies, but also change their processes, organization, and management of innovation. He explains why experimentation is so critical to innovation, underscores the impact of new technologies, and outlines what managers must do to integrate them successfully. Drawing on a decade of research in multiple industries as diverse as automotive, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and banking, Thomke provides striking illustrations of how companies drive strategy and value creation by accommodating their organizations to new experimentation technologies.As in the outcome of any effective experiment, Thomke also reveals where that has not happened, and explains why. In particular, he shows managers how to: implement "front-loaded" innovation processes that identify potential problems before resources are committed and design decisions locked in; experiment and test frequently without overloading their organizations; integrate new technologies into the current innovation system; organize for rapid experimentation; fail early and often, but avoid wasteful "mistakes"; and manage projects as experiments.Pointing to the custom integrated circuit industry--a multibillion dollar market--Thomke also shows what happens when new experimentation technologies are taken beyond firm boundaries, thereby changing the way companies create new products and services with customers and suppliers. Probing and thoughtful, Experimentation Matters will influence how both executives and academics think about experimentation in general and innovation processes in particular. Experimentation has always been the engine of innovation, and Thomke reveals how it works today.

This book offers a comprehensive assessment of the innovation system of Viet Nam, focusing on the role of government and providing concrete recommendations on how to improve policies that affect innovation and R&D performance.

Innovation underpins competitiveness, is crucial to addressing societal challenges, and its support has become a major goal of public policy. But what really works in innovation policy, and why? This book contains meta-evaluations for 15 key innovation policy instruments.

Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage. How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns. Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

This publication summarises the main findings of a series of high-level expert workshops, organised with support by the European Commission, to deepen the understanding how OECD countries can move towards a broad‐based form of innovation policy for regions and cities. Weaknesses in technology and knowledge diffusion are weighing on productivity growth and innovation in OECD countries, particularly in firms that are distant from the technological frontier (global or national). This in turn weakens their capacity to meet future challenges and undermines inclusive growth.

Climate tech is critical for averting planetary chaos. Half the greenhouse gas reductions required to reach "net-zero" climate targets in 2050 will need to come from technologies that have not yet been invented. Making Climate Tech Work is an insightful analysis of how smart government policies can make those technologies a reality. Which approaches can lead us to a sustainable economy, and which are likely to fall short? Learn how Denmark became a wind energy superpower, Germany incentivized renewables, Australia phased out incandescent bulbs, and why carbon taxes have failed around the world - but could be designed for success. Alon Tal expertly distills each policy's benefits and drawbacks, along with related ethical questions and public perceptions. The result is an essential primer for anyone interested in accelerating climate tech solutions.

Since Schumpeter, economists have argued that vast productivity gains can be achieved by investing in innovation and technological catch-up. Yet, as this volume documents, developing country firms and governments invest little to realize this potential, which dwarfs international aid flows. Using new data and original analytics, the authors uncover the key to this innovation paradox in the lack of complementary physical and human capital factors, particularly firm managerial capabilities, that are needed to reap the returns to innovation investments. Hence, countries need to rebalance policy away from R and D-centered initiatives †“ which are likely to fail in the absence of sophisticated private sector partners †“ toward building firm capabilities, and embrace an expanded concept of the National Innovation System that incorporates a broader range of market and systemic failures. The authors offer guidance on how to navigate the resulting innovation policy dilemma: as the need to redress these additional failures increases with distance from the frontier, government capabilities to formulate and implement the policy mix become weaker. This book is the first volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.