International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2009

Understanding how an innovation system emerges and develops is critical to its promotion and to ensuring successful innovation processes. Unfortunately, research on innovation system approaches has neglected the interplay between innovation and entrepreneurship and overlooked focus on how innovation systems occur. Based on a unique framework integrating the innovation systems concept and entrepreneurship theory, this study uncovers a process of innovation system formation: a self-organizing system of innovation based on a promising technology: the New Rice for Africa (NERICA). This finding highlights the pre-eminent role of entrepreneurship in innovation processes, thereby posing new challenges for development actors and opening up a new avenue for research into innovations.

This article investigates whether novel benefit-sharing arrangements might give rise to a new form of bioprospecting activity through the examination of what appears to be a new model of bioprospecting represented by Gram Mooligai Company Limited (GMCL). GMCL, which is a community-based enterprise active in herbal sector in India, sells medicinal herbs and commercializes phytomedicines using the local ethnomedicine knowledge. The article aims to show how an alternative representation of bioprospecting from below can be an instrument to enhance the local livelihoods of communities and promote their empowerment and capacity building.

A farmer-to-farmer learning and innovation process (FFLP) for technology development was developed in four districts in Northeast Thailand, and changes in farm income and diversification of 100 farmers (25 per village) were assessed in 2005, before FFLP was begun in 2006 and 2007. Forty per cent of farmers obtained information from FFLP for herbal repellent and liquid organic fertilizer. Eighty-three per cent of farmers adapted at least one of the four technologies. Farmers adapting cassava-based animal feed increased 39 per cent, herbal extraction increased 111 per cent, liquid organic fertilizer increased 116 per cent and custard apple management increased 156 per cent. Principal reasons for adapting these technologies were reduced cost, increased farm yield, chemical free products and reduced pests. Adapting farmers had 99 per cent (2006) and 141 per cent (2007) higher farm income than non-adapting farmers. Farmers with three agricultural diversification activities increased by 850 per cent from 2005 to 2007.

Iran's industrial sector would be expected to improve its performance on the development and utilization of technology to enhance its competitiveness and increase its market share. This study explores the impact of indigenous technological capability (ITC) on the technological development process (TDP) in 129 Iranian industrial firms. This study investigates the extent of R&D capability and the ability to learn at the level of the firm as major factors that bear on the ability of firms to acquire, absorb and innovate technologies. Preliminary findings suggest the significance of the relationship between ITC and TDP, and they show that some inter-firm factors act strongly as determinants of the success for TDP.