Comparing innovation systems: a framework and application to China’s transitional context

This paper proposes a generic framework for analyzing innovation systems, anchored around five fundamental activities — R&D, implementation, end-use, education, linkage — and focused on the performance implications of a system’s structure and dynamics. Rather than simply describing the role and performance of particular actors, institutions and policies, this approach focuses on system-level characteristics, including the distribution of these activities within the system, the organizational boundaries around them, coordination mechanisms, evolutionary processes, and the effectiveness of the system in introducing, diffusing and exploiting technological innovations. The framework is applied to a comparison of China’s national innovation system under central planning and since reforms, revealing the evolving structure and dynamics of this system and current inconsistencies and perverse incentives that policymakers must address to realize their development goals. More generally, it provides a basis for addressing the implicit assumptions of organizational types, roles and convergence among innovation systems emerging in very different contexts, whether national, regional or industrial. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.