2. Theories of new-to-the-world innovation
production
The national innovative capacity framework
seeks to integrate three perspectives regarding the
sources of innovation: ideas-driven growth theory,
microeconomics-based models of national competitive
advantage and industrial clusters, and research on
national innovation systems. While these perspectives
contain common elements, each highlights distinct
drivers of the innovation process at the national level.
Ideas-driven growth theory, the most abstract conceptualization,
focuses at an aggregate level, emphasizing
the quantifiable relationships among a small
set of factors that determine the flow of new ideas
in an economy. While the centrality of technological