Innovation of what, for what: Reconnecting innovation, industrialization and sustainability in Africa

By Gussai Sheikheldin, Musambya Mutambala and Bitrina Diyamett, from STIPRO (Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research Organization), Tanzania

Innovation has become a staple name in discussions about development (economic, sustainable, social, etc.); particularly now in developing countries. From national policies, to development research, to international funding to media promotion, the term ‘innovation’ has become not an important but a central issue in these circles. In scholarly circles and related policy circles, innovation is generally defined as successful creation, development, and marketing of new products or techniques or ways of working that improve the effectiveness of an individual and organization (Aubert 2005). With this broad definition, innovation is understood as a force for productivity and creativity on all fronts of development and sustainability. In other circles that also use innovation enthusiastically, the meaning of innovation is often even broader.

Despite making rounds in developing countries, including Africa, for more than two decades so far, the impact of the innovation discourse on African realities – in sustainable development, industrialization and inclusive growth – is not proportionate to its popularity in scholarly/theory and policy discussion circles. Currently, the innovation discourse faces three major challenges in Africa:

• First, the term ‘innovation’ has reached a level of near saturation in common language, but with abstraction that renders it vague and, often, irrelevant to policy implementation, particularly in tangible issues such as industrial policy.
• Second, when a concept becomesso broadly used it can be a sign that it is fading away, if not rescued (particularly if that use is abundant in theory while less visible in practice); similar to thestory of what happened to the discourse of appropriate technology in the 1980s and 1990s (Adeel, Schuster and Bigas 2008; Gamser 1988).
• Third, the innovation discourse about Africa has long been dominated by non-African voices. Such trend should change. Well-meaning voices that represent the ‘authorities’ of innovation discourse, outside Africa, may contribute to understanding the African context but may not replace local organic perspectives.

Sub-challenges to this challenge are related to African learning and African funding, two areas that need to be fleshed out and accounted for. The way innovation is introduced, as a subject to learn more about, in academia and policy circles, rarely provides connection to grounded examples in African development issues and case studies. Additionally, while innovation has successfully become a word to hear everywhere, funding for innovation projects, programs and campaigns is mostly coming from outside Africa. These two challenges in African learning and African funding contribute to making innovation a dominant term in Africa yet still not felt as actually owned by Africans themselves.

Concerning relevance to development in Africa, what the innovation discourse should be about is influencing industrial development policy, through which goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth may be realized. For that, an innovation lens needs to be placed within a larger lens. An innovation-focused lens is problematic for industrial policy in Africa due to two main reasons; the first is that innovation can be good, bad, or inefficient, but innovation-focused lens often fails to acknowledge all these possibilities. Case examples can be given—good innovations emerged from ICTs, renewable energy and access to education, yet bad innovations can be demonstrated by many ‘innovative solutions’ that eventually proved to be time wasted in the wrong direction, such as the so-called green revolution in developing countries (Lappé, Collins and Rosset 1998)which did not result in what was promised in terms of outstanding agricultural productivity and food security. The resources and time invested in the so-called green revolution approach were not proportionate to their outcome. Inefficient innovations can be showcased by many examples, such as the Dvorak vs. the QWERTY keyboards story, which shows that sometimes least effective products become more popular due to technical circumstances and not necessarily due to their actual merits (Rogers 2003). Another example is how innovative social enterprises can do some good in their targeted communities but fail when they attempt to replace the public sector in key development undertakings, such as energy and education (Gordon 2018). The second reason an innovation-focused lens is problematic for sustainable development is that, often, what Africa needs is ‘more of the same’ of good practices rather than new, ‘innovative’ practices, but innovation-focused lenses marginalize that importance when discussing development. For example, public education, healthcare, infrastructure and public services are still main requirements for almost everything else on the list of sustainable development goals, but innovation – in its common definition – has little role to play there. Furthermore, developing countries in Africa need more of conventional industrial development practices such as R&D, reverse-engineering, industrial parastatals, etc. which are not necessarily ‘innovative’ but have proven to increase industrial and technological capabilities as well as growth (Lall and Pietrobelli 2005).

To overcome the challenges of the existing innovation discourse, we propose a new synthesis for Africa that can shift the existing discourse to be more relevant to industrial policy. The proposed synthesis reorients the innovation discourse through applying three main rules:

• The first rule is addressing innovation through lenses of clear purpose—always ask: innovation of what, and for what. Without this question, what is called innovation is generally obscure and too broad. The aim of the question of is to serve clarity; sound policy and action require clarity.
• The second rule is distinguishing innovation from standard practices such as R&D, increasing capabilities, reverse-engineering, etc. Such practices should be clear objectives of industrial policy, even when not particularly ‘innovative’ (Newman et al. 2016; Msame and Wangwe 2016; STIPRO 2010).
• The third rule is not shying away from grand goals. Frameworks such as technological autonomy (Sheikheldin 2018) – which argues that “if developing societies seek genuine human and socioeconomic development then they need to seek technological autonomy, [which] refers to the attainment of a sufficient level of self-determination in generating and managing technological phenomena for that society” (p. xv) – may sound to preach far-fetched aspirations, but they help organize resources and initiatives to build-up towards desired goals. Such thinking is parallel to how an influential economist, Piketty (2014), in Capital in the 21^st Century, argued for a global tax on capital and said that, even though it may seem too far from reality now, such idea helps orient our direction and efforts towards more coherent and comprehensive solutions.

Although this argument and proposal may seem as if it is attempting to counter and limit the use of the innovation discourse with relevance to industrial policy and sustainable development, we rather see it as an attempt to save that discourse from over-saturation and losing relevance due to overuse in theory with minimum impact in practice. We think it is legitimate proposal, especially for dynamic areas such science, technology and innovation (STI) policies.

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References

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• Lall, S., and Pietrobelli, C. (2005) ‘National technology systems in sub-Saharan Africa’, Int. J. Technology and Globalisation, 1(3/4): 311-242.
• Lappé, Frances Moore, Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset. 1998. World Hunger: 12 Myths (2^nd ed). Grove Press/Earthscan.
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