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GLOBELICS was established at a gathering in Denmark in November 2002 to create a global network of scholars who apply the concept 'systems of innovation and competence-building' as an analytical framework. The objective of the global network is to share experiences worldwide on methodological issues, analytical results and policy relevant practices among scholars. In so doing, it is hoped to provide a continuous mixture of new ideas, thoughts, research and policy proposals that might be of particular interest to policy-makers, practitioners as well as Doctoral students.
Background
The establishment of GLOBELICS was motivated by a general awareness of emerging global trends and specifically, the following factors:
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Under pressure for international competitiveness, the US, Europe and Japan are increasing the availability of research monies. As these regions direct their spend towards the transformation of their domestic enterprises, a growing gap is emerging with the much more limited institutional support to scholars in the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres working in the fields of innovation-centred policy research.
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The increased awareness of the gap in research and innovation activities between the US and Europe has led to a European policy aim to increase research activities within Europe significantly between now and 2010. These aims are contained in the so-called Lisbon Declaration and Barcelona targets. The 6th EU framework program earmarked approximately 8 billion Euros for European research over four years, based on the need for more integrated and network research activities which included the social sciences.
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These initiatives appear from the local, European perspective and are likely to further exacerbate the growing gap in access to knowledge between the rich core (US, Europe and Japan) and the rest of the world.
GLOBELICS therefore represents a response to these challenges and a reassertion of the responsibility of knowledge institutions and research programmes to engage in countering these negative aspects of these tendencies.
National systems and global governance
The many contributions to the literature on "national" systems of innovations have been valuable in bringing to the forefront the importance of "nation state" institutions in inducing or hindering processes of competence- building in a variety of countries. The attempts at comparative learning through such detailed studies have formed the basis for the current innovation policy benchmarking exercises being carried out both within the EU and across the EU, the US and Japan. There is therefore a crucial need to broaden this framework not just geographically but also in terms of content to take into account the rapid rise in pressures associated with globalisation and the lack of an equitable framework for global governance.
Analytical focus
The analytical focus of GLOBELICS is learning, innovation and competence-building systems. The analytical approaches are inspired by different disciplines and sub-disciplines such as:
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Economics of knowledge and innovation
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Development economics and economic geography
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International business studies and organisation theory
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Theories on competence-building in labour markets and in education systems
GLOBELICS promotes comparative research aiming at locating unique systemic features as well as generic good practices.
The activities
GLOBELICS is established as a worldwide network connected through regular meetings (annual conferences and PhD courses) and through an ICT-infrastructure (home-page, electronic publishing and ICT-based fora on specific topics). A dense European network with all the leading European institutions has been established and is now expanding to link up with regional nodes in Latin America (Rio), Asia (Beijing), Africa (Cape Town and Tshwane/Pretoria) and Eastern Europe (Moscow) respectively. Gradually the network aims to bring in all major institutions around the world that pursue high quality research and research training in this domain.
GLOBELICS organises an annual conference and an annual research training program for Ph.D.-students from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The site of the annual conferences will be located in developing economies while the research training (GLOBELICS Academy) takes place in Lisbon. GLOBELICS also constitutes a framework within which specific projects involving comparative research are initiated and presented.
To date, GLOBELICS has accomplished and initiated the following activities:
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The GLOBELICS inaugural conference was held from 3-7 November 2003. This was hosted in Rio de Janeiro. More information about this event is available at www.ie.ufrj.br/globelics.
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The first Asian Continental Learning, Innovation and Competencebuilding Systems (AsiaLics) International Conference was held in Bangkok from 1-2 April 2004.
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The first GLOBELICS Academy ran from 22 May to 5 June 2004 in Portugal. A total of 40 candidates attended the event including three South African PhD candidates.
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The 2nd GLOBELICS Conference will take place in Beijing from 12 to 20 October 2004. Further information regarding this is available at www.globelics-beijing.cn/index2.asp.
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The 2nd GLOBELICS Academy will take place between the 23rd of May and the 3rd of June, 2005, in Lisbon, Portugal. More details are available at www.globelicsacademy.net/2005.asp
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The 3rd GLOBELICS Conference will take place in South Africa between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2005. This will be hosted in Tshwane (Pretoria). More information is available at www.naci.org.za and www.globelics.org.
GLOBELICS in Africa
It is expected that through the GLOBELICS initiative, we will stimulate and sustain a new agenda that seeks to re-think and re-frame African development. This would be aligned with the current renaissance concept of Africa that has accompanied the emergence of South Africa from apartheid exclusion. Scholars from innovation studies will engage with those from development studies in order to enrich the approaches and perspectives that can guide policy and action to bring about transformation through enhanced learning, innovation and knowledge competencies.
The National System of Innovation (NSI) perspective offers insights into bringing about intra-African economic and knowledge linkages. The NSI framework will assist in probing and searching to establish a more integrative and dynamic Africa-wide system of production, consumption and distribution. This is extremely important in relation to the evolution of South Africa's policies and systems since the defeat of apartheid. Coupled with the transformation of the country's science and technology policies, the NSI has expanded to influence broader industrial strategy and is now recognised as offering significant benefits in South Africa's microeconomic reform process. These characteristics are defining a new position and role for South Africa in relation to Africa.
Ten years of democracy and South Africa’s national system of innovation
The first post-apartheid government of South Africa formulated and adopted a new constitution and a bill of rights for the country. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Act 108 of 1996), was approved by the Constitutional Court on 4 December 1996 and took effect on 4 February 1997. This established a formal system and structure of governance based on the principles of universal suffrage and democracy. The developmental aspirations of government were contained in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of 1994 and centred around meeting basic needs, building the economy, democratising the state and society, developing human resources and nation building. The RDP orientated sector specific policies and provided the basis for ensuring congruence and alignment.
The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST), with the support of the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), developed upon the proposals emanating from the interregnum of the 1990 to 1994 period and published a Green Paper on Science and Technology. This collated and structured the demands of a hitherto unrecognised set of concerns regarding the organisation of the publicly funded knowledge creating resources of the state. Submissions on the questions posed were then collected, and a drafting team prepared the White Paper on Science and Technology (WPS&T). This document was subtitled: "Preparing for the 21st Century" and was adopted by Cabinet in 1996. In the same year and premised on the need to stabilise the macro-economic environment, government also adopted its "Growth, Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR) strategy.
GEAR was positioned as an integrated strategy that spanned the multiple sectors of government. The National Treasury maintained fiscal discipline and reduced the overall government debt exposure. As an internal or administrative change, this strategy also broke the annual and incremental departmental budgeting process by introducing a three-year medium-term planning horizon. GEAR, being driven by macroeconomic models, therefore ushered in the current capacity to plan for multi-year budgets based on a relatively lower risk assumption on the part of the state.
The WPS&T maintained a consistency with this framework. It also adopted a systemic approach and introduced the National System of Innovation (NSI) as its heuristic device. Accordingly, the NSI was defined following Freeman's definition as "a network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and actions initiate, import, modify and diffuse new technologies" (DACST: 1996). This may be considered a derivation from the school of evolutionary economists who saw a system of innovation as a network of economic agents, together with the institutions and policies that influence their innovative behaviour and performance. It is important to realise that a number of features differentiate an innovative system from both earlier equilibrium-based models of economic systems and from the notion of action and reaction (feedback) contained in more mechanical versions of systems thinking brought into the social sciences.
An innovation system, following Lundvall, is conceptualised as an evolutionary system in which learning takes place at both the firm and the systems level. Underlying the system of innovation approach is an understanding of innovation as an interactive process in which enterprises in interaction with each other and supported by institutions and organisations such as industry associations, R&D, innovation and productivity centres, standard setting bodies, universities and vocational training centres, information gathering and analysis services and banking and other financial mechanisms, play a key role in bringing new products, new processes and new forms of organisation into economic use. In this context, institutions are defined as stressing a persistent and connected set of rules, formal and informal, that prescribe behavioural roles, constrain activity, shape expectations, give order to expectations and allow actors to coordinate under conditions of uncertainty.
The early adoption of the NSI framework by South Africa has afforded the country to generate a significant amount of learning from its utilisation. While this has generally enabled progressive transformation, the continental and developing economy condition of reproducing post-colonial characteristics still continues. The South African NSI therefore also displays significant peculiarities such as being lopsided and thereby contributes to bifurcation into a dual economy. South Africa, like any other country on the continent, is yet to successfully forge a coherent and integrated national framework for innovation and learning that interlinks firms with producers and users. In this respect, South Africa's sharply distinguishable dual economy is actually supportive of increasing the possibilities for integrating their NSI across the African continent. This is largely due to the lack of radical differences at the national level in respect of the majority of the population.
President Thabo Mbeki noted as South Africa entered its third democratic government that the country still experienced a division between a first and second economy. He defined this dualism as comprising a "First Economy, which is modern, produces the bulk of [South Africa's] wealth, and is integrated within the global economy". According to Mbeki, the "Second Economy, or the Marginalised Economy, is characterised by underdevelopment, contributes little to the GDP, contains a big percentage of our population, incorporates the poorest of our rural and urban poor, is structurally disconnected from both the First and the global economy, and is incapable of self-generated growth and development" (Mbeki: 2004: State of the Nation Address, Cape Town).
The framing of this dualism in these terms expresses a similarity with conditions present across Africa. The rate at which South Africa is able to bridge this division through building links between them offers learning opportunities and challenges to the process whereby South Africa seeks to integrate with its continental partners. The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NePAD) and the African Union (AU) are organisational vehicles that potentially offer the prospects for trans-continental learning to be facilitated.
This situation is not far removed from other regional efforts at integration and harmonisation. As such, hosting an event like GLOBELICS will stimulate a focus on processes, which require carefully constructed analyses, but where the human resources required for such tasks are in short supply. Through the network of GLOBELICS and its incorporation of some of the leading international scholars of learning and innovation systems, the potential for North-South dialogues will be promoted and through peerlevel interactions, the quality of research analysis will be enhanced in Africa. The publication of Putting Africa First: The Making of African Innovation System (2003) is a good example of positive South-South interactions and the productive engagement with northern academics.
Expected outputs, outcomes and benefits
GLOBELICS 2005 Africa will benefit the entire community of learning and innovation practitioners, researchers, post-graduate students and policymakers. The process of organising GLOBELICS 2005 Africa will create the space for doctoral and post-doctoral studies to acquire ready and willing support from a community of leading world scholars in innovation theory, practice and policy within Africa. The benefits of this with respect to the outward flows of scholars from the continent, due to the lack of research opportunities, may be mitigated. This process will seek to encourage as many aspirant or candidate African scholars to interact with leading academics from around the world and enhance the quality of their research, strengthen their methodological approaches and deepen their knowledge bases. The international scholars will take time to provide feedback within the formal and informal context of the Workshop and the Conference and thereby create a learning environment that stimulates African scholars to step forward and lead the field in Africa.
It is expected that a conference proceedings book will be published after a peer-review process. A thematically edited book from selected papers will also be prepared for publication.
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