Why Developing Countries Are Lesser Innovators

In this paper, we observe that developed countries are generally equipped with innovation capabilities and produce major chunk of the world’s knowledge and technology. The contribution of developing countries, on the other hand, is insignificant, and most of them far behind the global technological front. More specifically, we empirically observe that the developing world neither contributes substantially to the world’s scientific publications nor to the R&D activities. They also have lesser “absorptive capacity” and “technological capability”, and their “innovation systems” are plagued with many problems. Finally, we argue that these countries can break the shackles and improve their innovation capabilities by pursuing genuine innovation policies on long-term basis with honesty and commitment. Keywords—Absorptive capacity; Developing countries; Scientific publications; Technological capability