Managing Innovation, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 14 Capturing Social Value

So far, we have focused mainly on how firms can better capture the benefits of innovation, but arguably innovation has an even more profound influence on fundamental economic and social development. In this chapter, we briefly review some of the relationships between innovation and economic and social development and argue that there is much potential for innovation to make a more significant, positive contribution to emerging economies, social service, and sustainability.

14.1 Building BRICs – The Rise of New Players on the Innovation Stage

The current wave of innovation expansion has seen a focus on key countries known as BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – but there are many other smaller economies surging into the same space – for example, Kazakhstan or South Africa. They share a mixture of rich resource endowments, relatively young populations, large potential domestic markets, reasonably developed infrastructure, and a technological base, which provides them with a platform for growing and building innovation capability to play on the wider global stage.

In his best-selling book, The world is flat: The globalized world in the 21st century, Thomas Friedman argues that developments in technology and trade, in particular information and communications technologies (ICTs), are spreading the benefits of globalization to the ...