ABSTRACT
Innovation activities can be studied at a variety of conceptual levels. Until the early 1980s, innovation studies had concentrated almost exclusively on analysing the firm level. The Schumpeterian and evolutionary economic traditions, for example, assume that innovation activities within firms are the motor of economic change. A new approach, which considers the national level as critical, emerged in the late 1980s. This approach considers a wide range of factors and institutions which enable a particular country to generate and diffuse technology, acknowledging the systemic nature of innovation. Its efforts have crystallized in the national innovation system (NIS) approach, as presented by Lundvall (1993), Nelson (1993) and Edquist (1997).
