Pranav N. Desai
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Email: dpranav@hotmail.com
India’s efforts in international science and technology cooperation were
initiated as early as 1950s in the post-independence period. These efforts
conducted through different actors and channels have been undergoing
transformation through different phases of regulation and deregulation of
economy. In recent years, the unfolding of globalization has tended to change
the routes, nature and magnitude of this process in significant ways. There has
been an unprecedented increase in the number of agreements on international
R&D collaboration world over. This phenomenon was confined to the triad
countries (US, Europe, Japan) while South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Singapore followed later. Hence, it is not surprising that the academic interest
so far was confined only to this region rather than to the developing countries
that are emerging destinations of R&D collaboration. However, these studies
have focused mainly on corporate R&D (Carlsson, 2006) and have not paid
due attention to other types of collaborations like bilateral and multilateral
collaboration. In a developing country like India with wide socioeconomic
disparities, this process might introduce new challenges and opportunities for
innovations and policy making. Some scholars have argued that globalization
of R&D by foreign firms divert resources from the main development needs
and create high-tech islands and widen disparities. These perceptions imply
further intensification of exploitation of financial, human and natural resources
without any linkages with local industries or benefits to host countries.
Contrarily, there are others who perceive this process as capacity enhancing
with the changing nature of R&D and collaboration pattern. According to them
the activities of the transnational corporations add new innovation capacity
by bringing new technology, global knowledge network and the resultant
diffusion of knowledge. Thus, a transition from international collaboration
of R&D to globalization of innovation is visualized. In the context of the
extreme position often taken, it is being realized that there is a “missing
set of negotiated rules and institutions enabling the economies involved in
international production activities to capture and share the potential benefits
associated to it” (Zanfei, 2005).
The ‘globalization’ process is a complex phenomenon and hence defined
differently by different scholars. However, it mainly refers to “high (and
increasing) degree of interdependency and interrelatedness among different
and geographically dispersed actors” (Archibugi and Iammarino, 2002).
In principle, therefore, a higher level of globalization could be expected
even with the same level of internationalization. Thus, this definition seeks
differentiation between the term ‘global’ and ‘international’. Further, the term
‘globalization of innovation’ denotes not only the economic application of new
ideas and knowledge based on R&D or technology but it can also be based
on organizational, managerial or institutional arrangements. In recent times,
the emerging technologies like ICTs, biotechnology, nanotechnologies, etc.,
are intensifying the process of globalization. Many theoretical and empirical
efforts to explain this varied phenomenon are proving to be inadequate. For a
systematic comprehension of this concept, some scholars have categorized this
process mainly into three stages. These stages are: international exploitation,
global generation and global collaboration. “These categories emerged in
three successive stages, even though the second and the third coupled rather
than substituted the oldest one” (Archibugi and Iammarino, 1999). The first
category refers to the efforts of innovators to obtain economic advantages
through the exploitation of their own technological competence in markets
other than the domestic one. In this category of ‘international exploitation’
as against the category of ‘global’ (interdependent and integrated), the actors
introducing the innovations preserve their national identity even while the
innovations are diffused and sold in multiple countries. However, further
explorations are required to analyze these changes and the complexities of the interrelationship between the three categories in its historical context.
It is also essential to note here that this phenomenon is not only being
shaped by the structure of the international S&T innovation system which
is hierarchical in nature and tilted in favour of the countries where S&T
resources are concentrated but it is also shaping the same. To provide a
focus on the contentious issues of globalization of innovation process, an
attempt has been made here to analyze whether the ‘globalization process’
is likely to change the collaboration pattern or introduce any discontinuity in
the international cooperation policy. The impact of these changes on India’s
innovation capabilities is analyzed after having identified these new changes,
the role of new actors and the learning process.
The paper is structured around six sections that include the changing
structure of international system of innovation to explain the process beyond
NIS, an overview of India’s NIS, and the fourth section has analyzed the
shifting focus of India’s international cooperation policy in the wake of the
globalization process. This section is not restricted to R&D collaboration
in the corporate sector but includes bilateral cooperation between different
countries and also inward and outward FDI that adds to learning. The fifth
section focuses on the recent phenomenon of FDI flows in R&D with an
analysis of the areas and nature of these investments.
No comments:
Post a Comment