Problems+&+Solutions

Promote success stories and develop outreach programs. Design frameworks for innovation agendas, including allocation of public/private mix by sector. Measure and evaluate results, especially to yield data on relative success of different initiatives. Tools to help determine if proposed innovations are appropriate and likely to succeed (rather than find out mistakes along the way). || Reform public R&D institutes. Provide technical assistance for reform processes. Set realistic goals and expectations from public sector financed projects. || Support technology diffusion and commercialization services (especially: diffusion, absorption, adaptation). Improve a country’s ability to create knowledge/technology not only absorb it from elsewhere || Develop the hard and soft infrastructure/ecosystem to support innovation. Mobilize funds to finance innovation from public and private sources and align with social goals Provide an effective legal basis for innovation and reforms. || Train innovation managers. Understand the role of vocational education. Engage the private sector (through incentives, but in ways to not distort the market). Create active learning networks for practitioners. || Mobilize funds to finance innovation from public and private sources and align with social goals. Provide early stage, angel finance, early equity finance. Develop and manage grant programs for SMEs. Structure IP/innovation components in finance deals. Get foreign investors to invest in R&D to modernize the economy. Build local markets and local currency financing. || Enable SMEs/innovative companies to move to a high growth trajectory. Identify and assess legal/bureaucratic barriers stand in the way of business growth. Attract foreign companies to do R&D in country, not just manufacture and assembly. Improve collaboration between universities and firms – based on what works elsewhere. Improve support for entrepreneurship. ||
 * Representative problems **
 * **//Problem//** //(See NOTES #1 below)// || **//Solutions//** //Links to content details should be available in all modules, sub-modules, etc.////Including, in each case, reports, case studies, Community of Practice discussions,// contextual qualifiers, etc. ||
 * ** Public sector investments in R&D are not effective. ** || Justify government investment in innovation and improve the impact of public expenditure in R&D.
 * ** Public sector R&D institutes are under-performing ** || Create innovation in the public sector and provide incentives.
 * ** Business need to develop new products and services and improve their processes. ** || Overcome barriers to research access.
 * ** The infrastructure eco-system is not developed. ** || Evaluate the density and quality of service providers (law, IP, consulting, real estate, etc.)
 * ** Long-term job creation needs to be accelerated. ** || Create and sustain jobs, especially for the young (including young researchers).
 * ** SMEs cannot find finance to start up or expand. ** || Manage how do ideas, talent and capital come together.
 * ** SMEs are not growing. ** || Help SMEs develop new products.
 * ** The country’s culture does not support risk-taking. ** || Effect cultural change through education on risk-reward realities, dealing with uncertainty, practical risk reduction, and risk communication strategies. ||

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 * NOTES**
 * 1) A question about the problem statement is: how refined should it be? It can be argued that “Country A needs to increase its innovation capacity” is not a problem statement; it’s a possible solution to a higher level problem statement such as “Country A’s economy lacks a sufficient STI base to generate economic growth.” Suppose, as a working assumption, that most users will enter the IPP with the first (lower) level of problem statement rather than the second (higher) level. Should users be encouraged, or at least provided with an option, to re-formulate – to a higher level - what they regard as ‘the problem?’ There should be some balance act in this; we want the user to focus on the real problem, not just an automatic solution, but going too far up may be getting too broad. In this example, it is reasonable to use the “Country A needs to increase innovation capacity” being as our level of solution domain.
 * 1) Employing an OCRIO-based approach (Outcomes, Constraints, Rationale, Intervention and Objectives) to innovation policy would take ‘outcomes’ as the core of policy design and analysis and not the innovation process itself. Thus instead of taking the innovation process itself as a framework to tailor innovation policy around, the OCRIO framework focuses the innovation policy agenda on activities that help achieve policy objectives and their desired outcomes. A solution-orientated innovation policy will take the desired outcome as its starting point and create a roadmap for achieving that outcome in the most efficient way possible. The starting point of the framework is ‘outcomes’ and not ‘failures’ nor ‘problems’. This is an important distinctive feature of the OCRIO framework, as the desired outcome becomes the focal point for policymaking and eventually coalition building and implementation. Subsequently innovation policies evolve out of an orientation toward outcomes rather than failures. **Innovation Policies and Socio-economic Goals: An Analytic-diagnostic Framework**, Sami Mahroum. INSEAD Working Paper. This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network electronic library at: []