Innovation for inclusive development (I4ID)

Inclusive growth is important for the development and political stability of our country and our continent. In this research programme we concern ourselves with how inclusive innovation support can help us achieve development priorities. This programme’s relevance for STI policy making lies in that we explore a new breed of policy instruments which will have to be developed in order to create more effective local innovation systems, role players and institutions that will contribute to inclusive socioeconomic development.

The overarching research questions for the programme are:

• How can public sector actors contribute to creating inclusive innovation systems that will effectively develop, adopt and diffuse new technologies towards providing inclusive growth and development?
• What will those systems look like, and how can one evaluate the performance of these systems?

This project is set within a larger research framework, where consideration is given to how a more effective STI policy-making system may be achieved to ensure interactions between various levels of projects.

As shown in the figure above  a fair level of interaction exist between the different focus areas of the research programme.

We have divided the core focus areas of the programme into three levels as explained below:

• Project 1: The development of innovation projects: This research project focuses on the development of innovations and technologies for the BoP (not discussed in this document as we are funding this through other means than SciSTIP).
• Project 2: Developing improved analytical frameworks: On this level we work towards the development of analytical frameworks for the identification and analysis of innovation opportunities and its practical implementation.
• Project 3: Monitoring and Evaluation of I4ID: We explore how we can improve our monitoring and evaluation of I4ID programmes in order to capture learning and evaluate successes and failures of I4ID programmes.
• Project 4: Learning planning and designing policy for I4ID: We consider how policy learning may be facilitated through creating a policy-making system that adopts learning and implement that in the conceptualisation, development and management of STI support programmes.