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FRANK L. BARTELS is Senior Advisor to the Deputy to the Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and was previously UNIDO Representative to Ghana and Togo, and Chief of UNIDO’s Strategic Research and Regional Analyses Unit.
key national stakeholders, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI). The subsequent report, Ghana National System of Innovation (GNSI) – Measurement, Analysis and Policy Recommendations, surveys and depicts, for the benefit of policymakers, the essential and systemic features of the innovation landscape in Ghana. The report contained the following conclusions: l The Ghana National System of Innovation (GNSI) suffers from low concentrations of organizational capital, which prevent systemwide combinations of skills and assets from delivering significant productivity increases based on science, technology, engineering, mathematics and information technology. l The quality of market demand is characterized by a few islands of sophistication in a sea of simplicity. This situation dissuades the manufacturing and service sectors from innovating in order to offer products of enhanced quality and value. l The organizational constraints within the GNSI and their bearing on the actors within it are unusually high. These constraints, mainly relating to managerial rigidities and investment risks, combine to thwart adaptive behaviour and prevent actors from responding to market signals. l The application of fiscal and monetary schemes falls short of fully supporting the risk appetite of innovators and businesses in the early stages of ideation (the creative process of generating, developing and communicating new ideas), invention and start-up. The gist of the report points to the GNSI being fragile, with an asymmetric distribution of actor linkages and with low-density relationships between the actors. The policy instruments that are available are neither
calibrated nor configured to successfully overcome the barriers to, and constraints on, innovation. The major implications are that there are few or no externalities from the public goods of funding research institutions. Furthermore, business enterprises have little access to external sources of ideation, and knowledge-based institutions’ outlets to markets through intermediation and commercialization are highly restricted. Based on these findings, the report makes a number of recommendations in relation to policies to enhance the country’s innovative performance. In conclusion, accelerating sustainable development requires new industrialization approaches that exploit knowledge and
innovation. Such policy approaches represent the crucial elements of any economy’s ability to enhance its competitiveness and economic growth. The national system of innovation (NSI) represents the strength and quality of systematically organized interactions between governments, knowledge-based institutions, industry and financial arbitrageurs (those entities, such as banks or brokerage firms, that engage in the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets). The NSI’s characteristics, and the policies that shape them, are the critical determinants of efficiency and effectiveness in the application of science, technology and innovation.
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