The voluntary underdevelopment paradox: revisiting Freeman’s ideas on indigenous capabilities for innovation in the global south

ABSTRACT

There is a growing recognition of the university as an actor with the capacity to articulate and respond to societal needs and demands expressed outside conventional market structures. Universities in the global south offer converging spaces where knowledge stemming from different groups in society is carefully weaved with that produced in the global north to produce innovations that cater to the needs of excluded populations. However, the trends that seemed to have enabled the development of indigenous capabilities in global south universities, coupled with a worrying disconnection between such capabilities and the real world of production, may be encumbering the upwelling of socially inclusive narratives and practices around innovation, limiting thus their full transformative potential. In this essay, we draw upon Freeman’s ground-breaking idea of voluntary underdevelopment and bridge it with that of (un)satisfactory innovations and social demands for innovation to explain this paradox and propose a way forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Voluntary underdevelopment
• indigenous capabilities
• innovation
• universities
• global south

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Carlota Perez, Bengt-Åke Lundvall and Birgitte Gregersen for their constructive and thorough remarks. All errors, omissions and simplifications remain the authors’ sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Voluntary underdevelopment, as put forward by Freeman in the essay ‘Science and economy at the national level’ (1992), refers to the idea that indigenous R&D and imports of technology are complementary not alternative strategies to promote economic development in developing countries. In this essay, we extend this idea, which was first suggested at the OECD experimental working session on Science Policy in 1967, beyond the domain of economic development as it is timely to reflect on the development of solutions for national problems faced by countries in the global south.

2 This concept originally refers to the relationships between users and producers of complex technologies and the unequal distribution of technological capabilities. This mismatch may result in innovations not meeting the user needs and thus termed as unsatisfactory (Lundvall 2016).

3 The projects documented by Grobbelaar, Schiller, and De Wet (2016) include multipurpose water platforms for informal settlements, a low-cost fire detecting and early warning system for urban informal settlements, a solar based mobile power station, an affordable energy-efficient and owner-based housing solution, and a simple and safe water purification solution.

4 See Guzmán (2016).

5 See https://fics.nust.edu.pk/ for university programmes aimed at serving communities by social problem identification and finding their technology-based solutions.

6 For example, Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission faculty development programmes (www.hec.gov.pk), or the human resources development and training programmes sponsored by the National Council for Science and Technology (Concytec) in Peru (www.fondecyt.gob.pe/convocatorias).

7 We acknowledge that public universities in Latin America may be more reluctant to recast their roles as knowledge producers for commercial ends due to the prevailing imprint of the University Reform Movement (1918). Nonetheless, we also observe growing pressures in regard to ranking performance and publication outcomes that may be skewing research priority setting in the region.