Innovation for development: the key to a transformative recovery...
Chapter I
Some Latin American and Caribbean countries have started to explicitly incorporate this focus into their medium and long-term innovation strategies. Colombia, for example, launched a “Mission for the Wise” (“Misión de sabios”) in 2019. In its final report, Misión de Sabios: Colombia-2019, it identified three major challenges for the country and five ways of addressing them (Government of Colombia, 2019). Similarly, Mazzucato and Penna (2016) described the Brazilian research subsystem in the field of health as one of Brazil’s islands of productive excellence. This makes it particularly well-suited to mission-driven policy initiatives, either explicitly or implicitly focused on innovation. However, these authors warn that this subsystem has lacked a long-term strategic agenda and that its self-direction, alongside the lack of demand for knowledge from the industrial subsystem, reveals the fragmentation of system. In Chile, the National Green Hydrogen Strategy was recently launched; this has the hallmarks of a public policy aimed at a specific task, although it is only in the preliminary design stage. Moreover, through its Science Ministry, the Government of Chile has decided to earmark part of its public budget for what it has termed “R&D targeting national challenges”, namely, climate change, the technological revolution, biological challenges (such as the ongoing pandemic) and social crises. One of the characteristics of this new focus is the necessary coordination between different actors, and especially between the government, academic and business sectors. Innovation is becoming a policy area involving all areas of government, which calls for new institutional arrangements that facilitate coordination and the strengthening of capacity-building and policy management. The COVID-19 pandemic, and all the problems it has caused around the world, has also provided an opportunity to apply this approach. The pandemic has also required governments to adopt more comprehensive strategies in order to address it, not only in terms of its immediate impacts, but also in terms of strategies intended to prevent the recurrence of such a phenomenon in the future (see chapter II). Everything in this chapter illustrates that the dynamism of technical change processes and the emergence of new national challenges (shown by the appearance of COVID-19 and the hazards arising from global warming) require the continuous review of the areas addressed by the country’s researchers and innovators, as well as monitoring of the effectiveness of the available instruments and the need to develop new ones.
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