Institutions, policies and diverse innovation systems: experiences from the US, Germany and South Korea

ABSTRACT

The importance of technological innovation in economic development has been acknowledged, and appropriate approach for building innovative countries needs further studies. The article uses the U.S., Germany and South Korea, three innovative countries, respectively, with three different politico-economic institutions, to explore the influence of institutions on the content and implementation of innovation policies. The similar institutional frameworks of the three countries bring policy convergence, but different government-enterprise relations, labour relations and capital market organizations affect their policy implementations and their final innovation systems. Thus, the compatability between institutions and policies is more critical than the “correctness” of innovation policy  models.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovative countries
• innovation systems
• institutional arrangements
• innovation policies
• comparative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. H index means a country’s number of articles(H)that have received at least H citations since 1996.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China [grant number 16JJD630009].

Notes on contributors

Xuan Jiang

Dr. Xuan Jiang earned her doctoral degree from the School of Urban Affairs and Public Administration at the University of Delaware in the U.S. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Government at the Sun Yat-Sen Sen Univversity, with research field in innovation policy and government-business relationship

Peipei Zhang

Peipei Zhang is a PhD candidate at Sun Yat-Sen University. Her current research interests are comparative public policy and performance evaluation.