National systems of innovation

The concept national innovation system was first used 1982 by Christopher Freeman in a working paper for OECD, linking national economic performance to technological infrastructure. Ten years later, the OECD adopted its own version of the concept and since then national governments, most prominently China, have used it to frame STI-policy. A central policy issue is, how governments should intervene in relation to domestic innovation processes and regulate the openness of the innovation system. Recently the concept has gained in significance since the two superpowers increasingly have followed techno nationalist strategies. At the same time, national systems have increasingly been challenged by tech giants, harvesting knowledge and data world-wide and developing their own corporate innovation systems. A major contradiction in world development is that while knowledge increasingly is privatized and subordinated to national interests, it is obvious that global challenges cannot be effectively tackled without transnational co-operation in production, science and technology.