Bengt Åke Lundvall, held a lecture on "Innovation policy in the globalising learning economy" at ISEG, Lisbon, on 2002-11-15. Besides Lundvall, this conference was a chance to listen to some very bright people, with great experience on economics and on relating their observations with public policies, namely regarding innovation.

Richard Nelson, Keith Pavitt, and Keith Smith were the commentators, coordinated by Jan Fagerberg and Manuel Mira Godinho.

A couple of weeks before this event, I worked on a presentation titled "The Knowledge Economy", and my starting point was the paper "What is the Knowledge Economy", by Keith Smith. It was mostly my curiosity to listen to Keith Smith, that made me travel to ISEG, on a rainy friday...

The conference was held on an amphitheater of white walls, with mono speakers spread all over the ceiling. Despite the electronics, including a huge RGB video projector, it was (is) a room of some tradition, built on the "old rocky" ISEG - the mono speakers are there to fight a natural strong reverberation.

Keith Pavitt was my favorite commentator. He did only a couple of speeches, but he was particularly incisive on key issues, such as the evolution of the role of universities on innovation, stating that it all began "naturally", with no particular public policies enforcing it (the USA government had computational needs, and the universities had the knowledge to build solutions), and so it isn't wise to regard public policies as granted solutions for innovation. Good public policies should reward innovation, but you can't expect innovation to happen just because of them. There are more powerful (and natural) driving forces.

Keith Smith spoke about a "list of technologies" (Infotech, Biotech, Nanotech...) which are commonly mentioned as the supreme examples of innovation... but on the line of his paper "What is the Knowledge Economy", he remembered that "there is no such thing as a low tech industry", and you certainly can understand that, if you think about the tomatoes you can buy, no matter if its Winter or Summer. Just search the Internet about those hydroponic tomatoes life cycle, and you'll be wondered...

Lundvall, focused on the need for "a broad set of policies". You can't expect effective innovation policies with localized, unarticulated measures. And you can read this on a national scope, but also on much wider (european) scale, meaning that a Government's "tentacles" (agencies, departments, ministries...) would do better to "cross plan", instead of searching for self-centered innovation paths. Europe is such a diverse continent, that achieving consistent national policies is a great challenge. For example, there is great potential on sectors like furniture, but that remains unregarded, very low on the priorities...

I had a hard time to listen and to understand Richard Nelson. He speaks very calmly, on a discrete volume, and a couple of persons on my front always chatted when he intervened.

I believe Nelson's key message was that countries don't necessarily need specific (micro) innovation policies on technology - more general or indirect (macro) policies can do the job. Take the USA example and its strong computers industry, which evolved from military needs, rather than from decisions like "let's have a strong IT sector"...

It was fun.

Bengt Åke Lundvall is Professor @ University of Aalborg;

Richard Nelson is Professor Emeritus @ Columbia University;

Keith Pavitt is Professor, SPRU @ University of Sussex;

Keith Smith is Senior Research Fellow @ INTECH, United Nations University;

Jan Fagerberg is Professor @ University of Oslo and Professor Convidado @ ISEG;

and Manuel Mira Godinho is Professor @ ISEG/Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.

Download some very amateur videos of the presentation:

c1_keith_pavitt.rm [9632 KBytes]

c2_keith_smith.rm [16964 KBytes]

c3_lundvall.rm [9678 KBytes]

c4_richard_nelson.rm [12769 KBytes]

In order to watch the videos, you'll need Real Player - get it (free) from Real Networks.