The Conception of Innovation Systems: Their Emergence and Development

Abstract

The evolution of national and regional innovation systems since their emergence is researched. It is shown that the conception of national systems of innovation (NSI) was originally developed in Japan in the 1950s. The Japanese experience was first presented in the late 1980s by Christopher Freeman, whereafter the conception of NSI began to develop rapidly in Anglo-Saxon countries, and then all around the world. This conception, together with the concepts of regional innovation networks and regional innovation infrastructure developed in the same year, led to development of the conception of a regional innovation system (RIS) in the 1990s. Further on, the conceptions of urbanized and rural innovation systems emerged. All this allowed the authors of the article developing a scheme of innovation systems of different levels and scales embedded in each other, based on at the lowest level, which constitute the interactive production and service innovation clusters. This scheme provides an understanding of how the strong fragmentation of innovation territories should be overcome.

Keywords

• national innovation system
• regional innovation system
• urbanized innovation system
• rural innovation system
• industrial innovation clusters
• service innovation clusters