ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on relevant insights from Innovation Studies, looking, in particular, at Socio-Technical Transitions literature's engagement with systemic perspectives on technological change and innovation. It concerns the National Innovation System (NIS) literature as a lens through which to understand the role of technological change in relation to economic development, including comparisons between different countries' 'levels of development' and the ways in which processes of 'catching up' have been achieved, particularly in the Asian Tiger and rapidly emerging economies. The concept of innovation systems emerged from a body of work in the 1980s and 1990s that sought to define an alternative perspective to neo-classical theories of economic growth. Essentially, innovation systems can be thought of as fertile gardens within which technological change and economic development can prosper. For developing countries, a core incentive was the promise of access to new technologies - technology ownership being directly correlated with economic wealth and still largely weighted towards the Global North.
