ABSTRACT
Ask any well-disciplined economist and they will tell you that economic actors have ‘no country’. Proceeding against the grain of received thinking, therefore, the notion of national systems of innovation is both provocative and challenging. The argument of this chapter, however, is that keeping the challenge alive requires that we rethink the way in which the ‘nationalness’ of national systems of innovation is conceived. Hitherto, in the course of comparative analysis, particular nation-states have been treated as necessary rather than contingent containers of innovative activity. While technologies have been successfully portrayed as fluid and always in the making, nation-states have been largely accepted as fixed, stable, and ready made. What has escaped attention is that just like technologies, nation-states are also being continually envisioned, designed, launched, remodeled, renamed, disassembled, and scrapped. 1
