Reframing the Debates on Innovation and Regional Integration in Africa

Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba ()
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Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba: Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, University of South Africa

A chapter in Innovation, Regional Integration, and Development in Africa, 2019, pp 1-11 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Innovation has been very critical and central to the establishment of modern industrial societies. The transformation of former agrarian societies of Europe, United States of America in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of recent, Asia was largely due to the development of National Systems of Innovation. In order to facilitate development, the State in these countries formulated public policies that prioritised investment in research and development with focus on innovation. In the United States of America for instance, investment in technology was initially focused on building military capability. Although such investments did not have commercial orientation as the overriding objective, they laid the foundation for the future industrial and technological innovations that the country has witnessed over the past two centuries (Moweri and Rosenberg 1993). Innovation has been defined as the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations (OECD 2005, 2012).

Keywords: Regional Integration Approach; Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS); Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA); Muchie; Southern African Development Community (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:aaechp:978-3-319-92180-8_1

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-92180-8_1

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