Finland’s new national innovation strategy

Tarmo Lemola
Director, Advansis Ltd., Finland

Cofisa closing conference, Gauteng, South Africa, February 17, 2010

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 Finnish National Innovation Strategy
2008
http://www.tem.fi/?l=en&s=2411

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Finnish National Innovation Strategy 2008

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 National Innovation Strategy 2008 – focus
points

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© Advansis Ltd 2009
Main factors behind the strategy
• Innovation as a key driver of long-run economic growth
• A shift in the geography of innovation
• The notion of innovation has broadened
• Empowering people to innovate
• Applying innovation to global challenges
• Improving connectivity between actors and factors
• Improving governance

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Innovation drives long-run economic
growth
• Much of the rise in living standards is driven by innovation and
this has been the case for a long time.
• Innovation entails the production of new knowledge. It results
from a range of complementary assets which go well beyond
R&D, such as software, human capital, new organisational
structures etc.
• The combined role of investment in intangibles, investment in ICT
and multi-factor productivity growth (joint productivity of capital
and labour) accounts for between two-thirds and three-quarters
of GDP growth in several OECD countries.

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 Geography of innovation is shifting
• Traditionally R&D has strongly concentrated on the biggest and
most developed countries (USA, Europe,Japan), and on big
companies of these countries.

5,6
34 %
USA 5,5
Microsoft
Europe 5,4
25 % General Motors
Japan Pfizer
5,3
Toyota
Rest of the Nokia
5,2
28 % World
13 %
5,1
R&D Bi €/A

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The rise of developing countries has
started
• China is in the lead:
• Its share of R&D expenditure of the world is 13 %
• I has more than million researchers (almost as much as in USA and
Europe)
• Its number of researchers has doubled in ten years
• Its share in scientific articles has grown from 1,6 % in mid-1990s to 6
% of today
• It is second biggest in scientific articles in nanotechnology
• Its growth in number of patents has been 30 % in the last ten years

….. Next come South Korea, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, too.

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South Africa and Finland in comparison
South Africa Finland

R&D expenditure ($ billion 2009) 4,6 6,7

% of GDP (2007) 0,9 3,4
Share of Business Enterprise Sector 58 72
R&D personnel 17 303 39 000
R&D personnel/1000 employees 1,5 16,6
Scientific articles/1 million inhabitants 51,0 917,2
Patents/1 million inhabitants 0,63 53,04
WEF ranking 2009-2010* 45 6

*World Economic Forum 2009, The Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010

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 The notion of innovation has broadened
• Innovation
• Product innovation
• Process innovation
• Service innovation
• Marketing innovation
• Organisational innovation
• Social innovation
• Design innovation
• Innovation is also more and more an interactive process that
occurs through collective or collaborative processes involving a
range of actors (firms, users, researchers, consumers, non-profit
organisations, NGOs, etc.).
• The innovation process has opened up (open source movement,
open innovation,user communities, living labs etc.)

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 Empowering people to innovate
• People are at the heart of any innovation process.
• There are several channels through which human capital spurs innovation:
• Generation of new knowledge
• The adoption and adaption of technologies and ideas
• The ability to adapt to change and to learn new things
• As production becomes increasingly globalised, societies can not sustain a model
where innovation is driven by a small trained elite and supported by a large body
of relatively low skilled production workers.
• The knowledge, skills, ideas and creativity of all workers must be encouraged and
engaged in innovation (Employee Driven Innovation).
• Local communities must be active participants in the technology and innovation
development process and not merely passive recipients of innovations developed
for them by outsiders.
• Fostering entrepreneurship is a crucial and critical compoment of capacity
building for innovation.

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 Applying innovation to global challenges
• Innovation is increasingly perceived as a critical part of the
solution with tackling global challenges:
• Poverty
• Bridging the gap in economic development
• Climate change
• Global health challenges
• Empowering new players to address global challenges (social
entrepreneurship)
• Governments and international organisations must provide a
stable policy regime which provides incentives to a large range of
actors to address global challenges through innovation.

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Improving connectivity between actors
and factors
• What is urgently needed in innovation in practically all countries
is – simply – improving connectivity between actors and factors of
the national innovation system:
• Public – private parnerships
• Collaboration ventures of any kind
• Intersectoral (-ministerial) collaboration
• Integration of users and customers with innovation processes
• Innovation forums
• Innovation and technology platforms at national, regional and local
levels

”Let all flowers bloom!”

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 Improving governance
• The time has come to develop a strategic approach to fostering innovation to
achieve the core objectives of public policy.
• The strategy should take a broad, system-wide approach to innovation, bringing
together policies and principles in a mutually supportive manners.
• Successful implementation of the strategy demands full and visible commitment
of the highest political level.
• Involvement of the wider innovation (STI) community (stakeholders) is a
necessary precondition for fruitful policy design and implementation.
• All societies are knowledge based societies. Only people can know and only
activity in individual brains can lead to a change in knowledge.

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 Final words to von Goethe and John Cage
”Everything is simpler than you think and at
the same time more complex than you
imagine”.(Johan Wolfgang von Goethe)
”It does not matter where you start, as long as
you start”. John Cage

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 Thank you!
All the best!
www.advansis.fi

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